-The Hindu Business Line The new scheme offers lower premium, more risk cover and hassle-free settlement Crop insurance schemes have not been a hit with Indian farmers in the past. High premia, limited coverage, complicated ways of assessing losses and delayed payment of compensation have kept farmers away from them. Given the high risk of crop damage in India, with significant loss in food grain production in 18 of the last 54 years...

-The Times of India Bengaluru: Midday meals and nutritious milk seem to have done the trick. Not many students are leaving government schools in Karnataka these days due to effective retention strategies, say experts. The number of out-of-school children has come down to 90,000 in 2016 from 7,00,000 in 2001, according to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) officials. The number of dropouts in 2015-16 was 12,878. Paradoxically, enrolment in government schools, which are in...

-The Hindu In the area of intellectual property, public health and access to medicines, the Narendra Modi government should consider its independence to be of the utmost importance. Strong government leadership as well as flexible intellectual property systems are needed in order to effectively combat drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) and HIV and also antimicrobial resistance and non-communicable diseases. This is true not only for India but also countries which rely on affordable generic...

-The Hindu Proponents of poll reforms see it as a ray of hope,others feel votes could be better used The 2013 Assembly Elections in five states saw the debut of the NOTA (short for the None of the Above) option that enables voters to reject all the candidates in the fray in a particular constituency. While the Supreme Court itself primarily focused on secrecy (which the earlier 49-O process compromised on as it...

-The Hindu Business Line BusinessLine goes to villages, including those visited in 2014, to understand the progress of the ambitious National Optical Fibre Network. Unused infrastructure and low awareness tell a story of missed links In one corner of the Ramnagar village panchayat office, in Panisagar block of Tripura, is a defunct four-year-old computer. The machine, connected with a 10 mbps broadband line was supposed to bring digital services to this remote...