-TheWire.in According to doctors working in hospitals providing low-cost treatment, the number of patients has reduced by about 30% since demonetisation. The recent debate on demonetisation-related deaths has taken place mainly in the context of people who died while waiting in bank queues or collapsed while standing in these queues and died soon after. In addition, there are those whose sudden death is being attributed to stress from not finding valid currency...

-CounterView.net A new report, “Promise and Performance – Ten Years of the Forest Rights Act (FRA)”, released at a recent national convention in Delhi, has revealed that less than 5% of rights out of a total of over 200 million tribals and other traditional forest dwellers for about 34.6 million hectares (ha) in India has been so far recognized. The report, released as part of the Community Forest Rights Learning and Advocacy...

-Livemint.com Economist Esther Duflo on demonetisation impact, role of randomized control trials in policymaking, low priority assigned to health and education in India New Delhi: India’s demonetisation of high-value currency notes is a dramatic example of a policy announcement made without any serious thought given to implementation, said Esther Duflo, one of the leading development economists of the world and a professor at the department of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of...

-PTI New Delhi: "We do not want politics to shift to the courts," the Supreme Court observed on Thursday while hearing arguments on whether a political party can file and pursue a public interest litigation (PIL). "The apprehension is that this will shift politics to the courts. We do not want this. We do not want politics to shift to the courts," a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and N V...

-The News Minute Rice Diversity Blocks in Kerala and five other states preserve over 1,000 indigenous varieties of rice that were at risk of being lost. In the Indian subcontinent, the birthplace of paddy, the colours of the crop’s many varieties are as diverse as the land, its people, languages, cultures, costumes, dialects and so on. But most of that variety was lost, when farmers were asked to forgo indigenous varieties...