-The Hindu Driven substantially by the higher education sector, real estate deals and mining income, India's black economy could now be nearly three-quarters the size of its reported Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These are among the findings of a confidential report commissioned by the government and accessed exclusively by The Hindu. Since there were no "reliable" estimates of black money generated in India and held within and outside the country, the UPA...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Hindustan Times Wastage of all kinds of food during farm-to-fork journey and also because of mindless indulgences by people with dispensable income whenever they visit supermarkets remains a global curse. It is known that over one-third of India's fruit and vegetables valued at over Rs. 13,000 crore is wasted annually in the absence of adequate refrigerated storage infrastructure and logistics deficiencies. The other villain is the anachronistic distribution system, favouring middlemen...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Telegraph Tura: The Meghalaya government is working out modalities to declare horticulture and agriculture yields as "organic certified". Farmers are being encouraged in organic production and the government is assisting in the certification process. Director of the horticulture department Daniel Ingty told The Telegraph, "Nearly 90 per cent farms in Meghalaya are organic by tradition. However, these are yet to be certified. The government has embarked an ambitious programme on mission organic...