-TheGuardian.com Hardworking women in India care for family members, cook, clean, garden, sew and farm without getting paid. When will official statistics recognise this? Women’s participation in work is an indicator of their status in a society. Paid work offers more opportunities for women’s agency, Mobility and empowerment, and it usually leads to greater social recognition of the work that women do, whether paid or unpaid. Where women’s work participation rates are relatively...

-The Hindu It has become irrelevant after the crippling budget cuts After facing a massive budget cut last year, the future of the Panchayati Raj Ministry continues to look bleak. After the BJP government shuttered two of its key programmes — the Backward Regions Grants Fund (BRGF) and the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Sashaktikaran Abhiyan (RGPSA) — several officials at the Ministry feel it would soon be closed down and turned into a...

-The Hindu Business Line The unique needs of those who work in cities even as they maintain homes in the village must be addressed by policymakers   Cities bring with them a sense of permanence. Many of them have been around for hundreds of years. Some of their more memorable institutions too tend to have long histories. It is no surprise, then, that most of urban policy takes aspects of a city to...

-The Indian Express Between 2005 and 2012, structural changes drove poverty reduction — non-agricultural incomes rose the fastest, and the largest shifts from farm to salaried non-farm employment were seen among the poorest. The significant shift from farm work to non-farm sources of income accelerated the decline in poverty in India. Non-farm jobs pay more than agricultural labour, and incomes from both were propelled by a steep rise in wages for rural...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The national capital is not “smart”, neither are financial capital Mumbai, information technology hub Bengaluru and eastern India’s biggest city Kolkata. They actually wallow at the bottom of a global livability survey of 181 cities. The 2016 Cities in Motion Index (CIMI), prepared jointly by the Barcelona-based University of Navarrara’s IESE Business School and the Centre for Globalisation and Strategy, found Indian cities floundering on most parameters that...