-The Hindu Business Line The PM Krishi Sinchai Yojana smacks of poor watershed planning. As with earlier schemes, accountability is absent The launch of any new scheme by the government always creates a sense of déjà vu. First, priorities, plans and programmes constantly change depending upon who’s in power at the Centre; second, schemes, new or old, deliver identical outcomes. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP), Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), MNREGA were all...

-IBNLive.com The Report 'Democracy in India: A Citizen's Perspective' tries to assess people's understanding and perception towards democracy. It is a part of a comparative study (State of Democracy in South Asia) of five South Asian countries that include, besides India - Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The first round of the SDSA was conducted in 2005 and a report based on it was published by Oxford University Press in...

-The Hindu Narendra Modi has asked for land rights to be granted quickly to tribals, but for that to happen, the forest Bureaucracy’s stranglehold on power must first go On June 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) to ensure that all States implement the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and grant land rights to tribals over the next two months. Mr. Modi’s announcement is welcome, but nevertheless...

-The Indian Express To improve the educational status of Scheduled Castes, a fresh understanding of their achievements and challenges is necessary. The concern of scholars, planners and policymakers has been to achieve the goals set in our Constitution: equality, justice and equal opportunity for all. However, in the period after Independence, it was revealed that education was not necessarily linked to social and economic development and the majority of Indians continued...

-Reuters Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to provide millions of farmers with income insurance linked to crop prices, officials say, but it may not do much to ease rural distress, with small farmers standing to benefit little and likely to be put off by Bureaucracy. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which swept to office a year ago, hopes to consolidate its power in local elections over the next two years, but anger...