-Business Standard Between FY16 and FY17, the number of farmers enrolled in the scheme declined from about 57.3 million to about 48.5 million, a fall of around 15% Kolkata: The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the flagship crop insurance scheme of the Narendra Modi government, has entered its third year of operation, albeit with a substantial decline in farmers' enrolment in its second year, the data reveals. Between FY16 and FY17, the...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-TheWire.in There have been no efforts to regularly compile and publish data on the social, economic and professional backgrounds of judges in either the higher or lower judiciary. The appointment of Indu Malhotra to the Supreme Court has rekindled the debate surrounding the ‘representativeness’ of the judiciary. She is only the seventh woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court in the seven decades of its existence, and the first woman...

-The Indian Express Women form 80 per cent of urban migrants, but public policy is blind to their concerns. A recent UN report says India is on the “brink of an urban revolution”, as its population in towns and cities are expected to reach 600 million by 2031. Fuelled by migration, megacities of India (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) will be among the largest urban concentrations in the world. Interestingly, the 2011 Census...

-The Hindu It has sharply lifted tax buoyancy and ushered many new return filers into the income tax net The argument about whether demonetisation was good or bad for the economy refuses to die down even a year after the event. Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan took potshots at it in a recent speech. While one can endlessly debate, with very little data, on whether the ban on high-value currency notes dealt a...