-The Hindu NITI Aayog will develop draft policy, which will be circulated to the Ministries for consultations Urban areas are likely to receive a renewed focus under the government’s ICDS programme, which provides for anganwadis or day-care centres across the country for delivery of nutrition and pre-school education. The government’s think tank, the NITI Aayog, has prepared a draft working paper, which once approved would be circulated to different ministries for consultations. These...

-The Hindu The self-enumeration option will, however, not be available in the first phase — the House Listing and Housing Census that is to be carried out from April 1 to September 30, 2020. In the second phase of the decennial Census exercise that will be conducted in February 2021, respondents will have the option to fill in details on their own, a senior government official said. The ‘population enumeration’ phase of...

-The Indian Express Reform of grain management system could free up resources for infrastructure investment. With GDP growth rate plummeting to 4.5 per cent and with the agriculture GDP (GDPA) growth at 2.1 per cent in the second quarter of this fiscal year, everyone concerned with the economy is anxious. The question being asked is whether the Indian economy can be put back on the 7-8 per cent growth trajectory and can...

-Financial Express An overwhelming number of Indians have claimed that they don’t have access to toilets, poking holes in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion of India having become open-defecation free under Swachh Bharat. But the NSO, which conducted the survey, also said that the respondents could not be fully trusted, and that they may have lied to underreport the access to toilets. About 30% of rural households lacked access to toilets...

-Business Standard Scholars across the world had appealed for the survey reports, including one on household consumer expenditure. The Union government on Saturday released five sets of survey reports on key socio-economic trends, most of which were approved but withheld. The junked consumer expenditure survey was not among these. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) released the survey reports, ‘Household Social Consumption in India: Health’ and ‘Household Social Consumption in India:...