-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...

-The Time of India NEW DELHI: India is greying faster than previously projected, even though it fares better than other Saarc countries and China. The government has disclosed that the number of people above 60 will rise to around 340 million by 2050. The number, revealed by junior minister for health Anupriya Patel in the Lok Sabha, is higher than projections made by the United Nations (UN) and other agencies, which also...

-ThePrint.in Study shows consumption of biofortified bajra also improves learning and mental abilities among school-going children. New Delhi: Biofortified pearl millet (bajra) can be a sustainable antidote for iron deficiency among adolescents in India and improve cognitive outcomes, a study published in the Journal of Nutrition claims. The study, conducted in Maharashtra among 140 economically-disadvantaged 12-16-year-olds, compared the effects of eating biofortified iron pearl millet to the conventional one. Their cognitive skills were...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to Growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic Growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-The Times of India In time of a raging debate over jobless Growth, nearly 24 lakh posts are lying vacant with the central and state governments, data compiled from answers to various questions in Parliament show. A Rajya Sabha question answered on February 8 shows that the largest chunk is the over 10 lakh vacant positions for teachers in elementary (9 lakh) and secondary schools (1.1 lakh). Apart from the vacancies in the...