-TheWire.in A substantial decline in the share of agriculture in a farm family’s income and the lack of quality education has eroded hopes of a better future for a majority of India’s farmers. While the government pays lip service to the image of the Indian farmer – picture the stalwart yeoman, “Bharat,” hefting a wooden plough on his shoulder – in fact, the conditions of farm families have been in secular decline...

-Livemint.com The Aadhaar project is a textbook example of how not to design and execute a public policy initiative in India When it was first launched in 2009, Aadhaar signalled a promise to repair the corroded plumbing of India’s leaky public delivery systems. The unique biometric identity would help reduce duplicate and ghost entries in the list of beneficiaries of government schemes, and pave the way for direct benefit transfers to them...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union cabinet today cleared a plan to introduce a pan-India minimum wage that will cover all sectors of the economy. The Labour Code on Wages Bill seeks to empower the Centre to fix a universal minimum wage for workers across the country. The new law is expected to benefit over 4 crore employees across the country. The Code will consolidate four different wage-related laws: the Minimum Wages Act,...

-The Hindu The headline in a recent PTI report “Saving 2 tigers gives more value than Mangalyaan”’ was intriguing, since it said that saving two tigers yields a capital benefit of Rs. 520 crores, while Mangalyaan cost us Rs. 450 crores. The headline was both exciting and hurtful. Excited by it, I contacted Professor Madhu Verma of the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal, and she shared with me both...

-The Hindu Business Line Entitlements of developed countries need to be eliminated before other reforms, study suggests New Delhi: Seeking to expose the double-standards of developed countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a joint paper by India and China has revealed that rich nations, including the US, the EU and Canada, have been consistently giving trade-distorting subsidies to their farmers at levels much higher than the ceiling applied on developing countries....