-The Hindu Business Line Output data is unreliable, which leaves us unprepared for shortages. And, farming practices are primitive The price of potatoes is once again moving up, largely due to the demand-supply gap in the market-place. The National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (Nafed) that was asked by the Ministry of Civil Supplies to explore the possibility of importing potatoes from Russia, China and Egypt, procured 3,500 tonnes of potatoes...

-The Telegraph The National Democratic Alliance government is planning to scrap the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, had already asked for the employment programme of the MGNREGA under which the state was obliged to provide employment on demand (failing which an unemployment allowance of a specified amount had to be paid), to be downgraded to a mere "food-for-work" programme, where the state...

-BBC Most parents would love to get their teenagers away from computers. But not in one poor suburb on the outskirts of Delhi, where youngsters are sent to learn. Sharing a few laptops between them, they're being taught some basic online skills - how to search for information, how to send money to their families in the villages and how to book train tickets. None of the children have access to computers in school....

-TheGoan.net As had been anticipated, on October 18, the Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to decontrol the prices of diesel, the most widely-used petroleum product in the country. Riding on an unexpected fall in world prices of crude oil, the government was able to simultaneously announce a sharp fall in consumer prices of diesel by Rs 3.37 per litre (in Delhi). But the decision...

-The Business Standard The NDA is looking to reduce fiscal deficit not by chopping social sector spending but by paring it down Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is fairly confident the government will meet this year's fiscal deficit target. At 4.1 per cent of gross domestic product the deficit looked looked like a bit of stretch in July but the food subsidy, for one, is not going to balloon as in previous years. The...