-Hindkisan.com “This amendment is an insult to people who fought hard to secure progressive provisions in the LARR 2013, it weaken people’s power to challenge illegal and unjust forced acquisition of land, and empowers the state and corporations to infringe upon people’s rights over natural resources” read the statement. Various civil society organisations have come together to oppose the recent President’s assent granted to the amendments made in the Andhra Pradesh Land...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-Livemint.com There isn’t any big base effect at work here, so the fall in wage growth is the result either of less demand for rural labour or more supply. Either way, it points to rural distress If economic growth is picking up, as all experts agree, why is growth in rural wages faltering? The accompanying chart shows that growth in rural wages for men, taken as the simple average wage rate for...

-BusinessToday.in New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a great orator. He also makes grand announcements about ambitious targets, leaving hapless officials and others to work out the details. And sometimes, exactly what he meant while making that announcement is not very clear to the people tasked with working out strategies and policies to achieve that target. One example is his speech during the Kisan Rally in Bareilly, UP, on 28th February...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...