-The Indian Express     Policy design should worry less about public versus private, and more about choice and accountability. The most noteworthy aspect of the Aam Aadmi Party's manifesto is the explicit focus on service delivery. This is what its government will be evaluated on, and attention has shifted from the AAP's political success to how it will deliver on these promises. The ideas below reflect learnings from over a decade of research...

-The Hindu Business Line     Whatever the criticisms against the UPA government may be, its effort to provide employment to large sections of the population under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act must be lauded. Yet, after the initial success of the scheme, the enthusiasm of the Central government itself seems to have diminished in its second term in power. How palpable is the shift to lower gear? Representatives of the UPA...

-Economic and Political Weekly     The usual explanations for the divergence between calorie intake and Consumption expenditure in India ignore the enormous squeeze on food budgets arising from dispossession (leading to loss of access to common property resources), rising migration (involving a loss of access to non-market food items) and the forced turn to the private sector for social sector services that are more expensive than public sector provision. It is the...

-The Indian Express Agricultural GDP is underestimated due to inaccurate non-cereal data. It started with a mundane question: what is the chicken population in India? There are glaring inconsistencies in the available data. The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO's) surveys show a 20 per cent annual growth of chicken Consumption between 2005 and 2010. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the production of chicken meat only rose 10 per...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India could prevent an estimated 400,000 people from becoming patients of diabetes over the next decade if the government imposes a 20 per cent extra tax on sweetened beverages, a new study has suggested. The study by researchers at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), New Delhi, and academic institutions in the US and the UK has also indicated that such a tax on soft drinks might...