-Scroll.in The cast of characters readers will meet is staggering, and necessary, to understand the complex relationship between democracy and some the poorest people. Very few books on poverty in India are as nuanced as Indrajit Roy’s Politics of the poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India. From its very first page, Roy has his readers agog when he informs them that “the world is richer than it has been at any time...

-Foundation of Agrarian Studies An influential section of Sri Lankan agricultural economists and scientists has deplored the recent course change in the country’s agricultural policy made by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government. The decision by the government to ban the use and import of chemical fertilisers and pesticides in pursuit of a “100 per cent organic food producer” status for Sri Lanka has already had disastrous consequences for the economy of the...

-Scroll.in/ IndiaSpend.com While links between child malnutrition and poverty are well-established, a new study shows how social discrimination is also a factor in stunting. Vulnerable to social discrimination, children from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslim families are more likely to experience stunting – a condition where the body height is less than the accepted range at a given age – says a new study. Even socio-economic advantages do not change the...

-Newsclick.in The rural employment scheme puts cash in hands of the most vulnerable and also builds their resilience to extreme weather events while sequestering carbon. When a jobless Jagdish Kheda returned home from Udaipur during last year’s lockdown, he was hopeless. But his native Dedli village, in Dungarpur district of Rajasthan, saw a slew of activities in the next few months, including the construction of a check dam and a road and...

-The Telegraph Inequality remains integral to India’s growth story This year marks three decades of market-friendly economic reforms introduced in 1991 by the P.V. Narasimha Rao administration. Manmohan Singh was considered the mastermind behind breaking the shackles of the license-permit raj, an inefficient government, a stifled private sector, and a strictly controlled import regime. All these led to low economic growth, large incidence of poverty, an inefficient, unwieldy public sector, and pervasive...