-The Indian Express It’s not as if the Centre cannot initiate reforms in agriculture. In fact, in at least three major areas, the onus for leadership and action lies with the Centre. For over a year, there have been news reports of Niti Aayog, the erstwhile Planning Commission’s new avatar, working on a wide-ranging reform package for India’s farm sector. In recent months, teasers have appeared hinting at the Centre’s plans of...

-The Hindu Economic growth alone is not enough to achieve key Sustainable Development Goals. It must translate into jobs for the poor and marginalised India is the fastest growing large economy in the world today. Despite this, one in every five Indians is poor. Multilateral agencies as well as governments are playing an active role in understanding problems relating to poverty and hunger and finding solutions to them. But these challenges are...

-The Hindu Business Line The NITI Aayog should revive district-level planning in order to implement the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution While the Planning Commission, which was virtually an executive arm of the Union government, stands abolished, the District Planning Committee (DPC), a constitutional institution mandated “to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole” with a focus on resource endowments, environmental conservation, infrastructural development and spatial...

-TheHansIndia.com Even through the Indian economy has been growing steadily in the post-reform years, more and more people in rural India, where 833 million Indians (70 per cent) live, people are consuming fewer nutrients than are required to stay healthy, according to a National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) survey. In rural population, cereals and millets form the bulk of the diet. In general, the rural population subsisting on an inadequate diet as...

-The Hindu Business Line Hyderabad: The Centre is hoping to achieve a growth rate of 8 per cent in the economy and 4 per cent in the agriculture sector this year. “We are growing at the rate of 7 per cent and this year we hope our agriculture growth will be more than 4 per cent,” Arjun Meghwal, Union Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs, has said. Addressing the valedictory...