-The Indian Express The bullet train project, kicked off after discussions between PM Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, is being built with a Rs 88,000-crore soft loan from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Mumbai: EARLY this month, Raghunath Sutar (32), a Warli tribal from Dahanu taluka in Palghar district, was at the office of the district collector when his neighbours in Sakhare village sent him WhatsApp messages and...

-ThePrint.in Political science departments can contribute a lot by introducing graduate level courses on research methods. This will help understand the findings of a poll. Dear Friends (if I may call you so), I am one of you. I share your nervousness about forecasting an election, almost go sleepless the night before the counting day, and jump in joy when we manage to correctly predict an election outcome, and through a heartbreak when...

-The Hindu Study says poverty levels fell from 55% to 21% in a decade, mainly due to the lowered burden in the southern States Kolkata: India’s Multidimensional Poverty (MDP) has dropped significantly, largely as a result of the performance of five key southern States. Between 2005-06 to 2015-16, poverty level came down from 55% to 21%, improving the country’s MDP ranking. Following the drop in poverty levels, India moved to the 26th...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Prakash Javadekar's human resource development ministry has failed to back up with details his four-month-old claim that Aadhaar-linkage had helped the government identify 80,000 "ghost lecturers'' at colleges and universities. Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan had moved separate Right to Information applications on the subject. Bhardwaj had sought the state-wise break-up of the "ghost lecturers", their names and those of the colleges and universities...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...