-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: With space constraints, creating a garden in Mumbai to grow pesticide-free vegetables and fruits may seem like a far-fetched idea. But one group of organic farming enthusiasts has shown how growing an organic kitchen garden in the city is quite an achievable feat. For the past five years, Urban Leaves India - a group of amateur organic farmers - has been spreading awareness about urban farming in Mumbai....

-The Indian Express We want Prime Minister Narendra Modi to succeed in his national campaign to tackle the vast problems of the poor in Bharat. But his one-time contractor turned Union minister for rural development is succeeding in making his own prime minister look contradictory and indecisive to the nation and the world. The prime minister talks about constructing toilets and improving sanitation, opening bank accounts for every poor, excluded family,...

-The Hindu We could hold people accountable to a reasonable standard of expectation and that's the first step, says economist Esther Duflo In 2003, French-American economist Esther Duflo co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan. In just over ten years, JPAL has carried out 568 field experiments - or Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) - in 56 countries,...

-The Indian Express A government shorn of Western educated ministers could change the status quo. Since 1947, Indians have not spoken out so strongly and clearly for a completely new brand of people running government. Mercifully, there are no ministers educated abroad. Thankfully, none of them has been brainwashed at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, the World Bank or the IMF, subtly forcing expensive Western solutions on typically Indian problems at the cost of...

-The Times of India Mitu Kumari, in charge of a government school in Patahin, a village on the outskirts of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has a measured enthusiasm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that toilets for girls will be built in schools that still don't have this basic facility. For her 146 students and three women teachers, absence of toilets is an intolerable problem. "I have written to everybody, from the village mukhia...