-CivilSocietyOnline.com At a recent interaction with a large group of colleagues in a regional meeting, one relatively junior member who visits schools daily as part of his training schedule was very disturbed with his experiences in a school. He did not like the way teachers were treated by senior functionaries when they visited the school. The functionaries did not empathise with several situations that the teachers faced in the school —...
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A Response to NITI Aayog's Rajiv Kumar on Seasonality and Job Losses After Demonetisation -Mahesh Vyas
-TheWire.in Mahesh Vyas of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) responds to the NITI Aayog vice-chairman’s dismissal of CMIE’s Research on unemployment in India. In an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, NITI Aayog’s vice chairman, Rajiv Kumar, has been dismissive about CMIE-BSE unemployment statistics. He says that I had no answer to chief statistician T.C.A. Anant’s question on seasonal adjustment of unemployment data. This is an incorrect description of...
More »Demonetisation anniversary: Why less cash in itself may not necessarily mean less black money -Sunny Verma
-The Indian Express It can also mean other things such as currency shortage, transaction mode shift. The government has presented a lower cash-to-GDP ratio as a key achievement of demonetisation, and a measure of black money being checked. Economists, however, caution against reading this metric in isolation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said last month that the cash-to-GDP ratio is down to 9% after demonetisation, from over 12% earlier. “Was it possible if a...
More »Improve nutritional content of school meals to tackle stunting - Soumya Swaminathan and SV Subramanian
-Hindustan Times As per the latest National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, which has been collecting data on diet and nutritional status of rural, tribal and urban populations for almost four decades, the calorie intake of children (1-3 years) in rural areas was only about 70% of their requirement due to shortage. In India, more than 4.8 crore children suffer from stunting, which means they are below the normal height range for their...
More »A welfare test for Aadhaar -Subhashis Banerjee
-The Indian Express Exclusion and denial of benefits to the poor needs urgent attention The news last month of the starvation death of an 11-year-old girl in the Simdega district in Jharkhand, allegedly because of denial of PDS ration due to Aadhaar linking problems, is appalling. The Aadhaar ecosystem definitely needs to pass a stringent welfare test much more crucially than the privacy test. Aadhaar undeniably has potential, and can perhaps even be...
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