-The Hindu Business Line The new series data cannot really be faulted. But it is important not to repeat the policy mistakes that hit industrial growth The 2011-12 base backdated GDP series LED to much discussion. The reduction in past growth rates gave them a political colour. It is unfortunate if the independence of the CSO and associated experts is questioned just because of this coincidence. A rebasing that uses much richer...

-Counterview.net Sharply contesting the Government of India claim that “open defecation has been entirely or largely eliminated” in the Hindi belt, a recent study, “Changes in open defecation in rural north India: 2014-2018” has found that “between 42% to 57% of rural people over two years old defecate in the open” in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Based on a survey of 1,558 households involving 9,812 individuals, and 156 “qualitative...

-The Hindu SC orders govt to file affidavit detailing steps so far taken in Lokpal appointment process New Delhi: The government informed the Supreme Court on Friday that a eight-member search committee has been constituted in September 2018 for zeroing in on eligible candidates for Lokpal and the anti-corruption authority will frame its own rules of functioning. The panel is LED by former Supreme Court judge, Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai. On September 27,...

-Newsclick.in Casual and contract workers’ proportion to regular workers has gone up to a record 53%. Nearly 2.4 lakh workers of government-run public enterprises have lost their jobs since the Narendra Modi LED BJP government took power in 2014. That’s a massive 25 per cent of the workforce. Simultaneously, the number of casual and contract workers has increased to 3.8 lakh. The proportion of such employees has zoomed up from just 36%...

-The Hindu But shola forests have remained “relatively unchanged” Kochi: The new year heralds bad news for the high-altitude grasslands of the Western Ghats. Over four decades, the country lost almost one-fourth of these grasslands and exotic invasive trees are primarily to blame, find scientists. Though grassland afforestation using pine, acacia and eucalyptus ceased in 1996, the exotics still invade these ecosystems, confirms a study published on January 2 in the international...