-The India Forum The annual public debate over the poorly constructed Global Hunger Index is all hot air; in the process the critical issue of child undernutrition in India, where authentic data is available showing very slow improvement, gets ignored. In the seminal book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen lamented that "social failures that are of enormous importance for development" received scant attention in public...

-The Hindu Any state intervention inspired by Islamophobic views will only help deepen majoritarianism The Uttar Pradesh government’s decision to undertake a survey of madrasas has raised serious concerns not just over the fate of these institutions but also on the future of Muslim identity. Other BJP-ruled States have also expressed concerns about madrasas. In May, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the word ‘madrasa’ should cease to exist. In September,...

-NDTV.com Wherever we may be in other matters in global rankings, in one we are right at the top. India, where 800 million people are still dependent on government doles for a meal, has the dubious distinction of carrying out the most expensive democratic elections in the world. It has been estimated that the 2019 parliamentary elections cost US $2 billion. In addition, parties and individual candidates spent another US $5...

-ThePrint.in RBI's rate hike also among decisions announced last week that might pay political dividends in state polls, but could come with commensurate economic costs, say economists. New Delhi: Is the Modi government prioritising political gain over much-needed economic prudence with an eye on crucial assembly elections coming up in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh this year and more lined up the next? The answer seems to be yes, going by several critical decisions...

-ThePrint.in Panchayats or local elected governments are supposed to lead socio-economic development but they have no funds to spend as per needs. The growing political importance of ‘good governance’ in Politics today brings the focus back on India’s chronic implementation failure problem. It pervades all development sectors like education, health care, law enforcement and infrastructure, but our understanding of what causes these failures is imperfect.  In fact, ‘implementation failure’ is embedded in the...