-Scroll.in Suranga is a horizontal tunnel-like well excavated in a hillside. Even as Kerala reels under severe drought, Gangadhar Rao never misses a day to irrigate thousands of areca nut trees, coconut trees and pepper plants on his 30 acres of farmland. Rao is a farmer from Bedadka Panchayath in Kerala’s northernmost district of Kasaragod and depends on Suranga for all his water needs — irrigation and domestic — round the year. Suranga is...

-Hindustan Times The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) is facing a shortage of investigators for conducting surveys, a response to an RTI filed by Hindustan Times revealed, raising questions about the quality of data being generated from these surveys. The field operations division of the NSSO, which is responsible for collecting primary data, has around 24% of positions vacant for the posts of junior and senior statistical officers. Data from NSSO is central...

-The Hindu Business Line Thiruvananthapuram: J Cherian, an MBA in biotech from Scotland, who took to farming on his ancestral property in central Kerala, watches in despair as a merciless March sun beats down on his young plants. “This is unlike anything that I've seen in my eight years in the fields,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders. The administration seemed to concur, with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan declaring that artificial...

-Hindustan Times The last few weeks have seen a spate of government notifications making Aadhaar mandatory for receiving the benefits of government programmes. The most recent orders relate to an Aadhaar requirement for children to access schools (even under their fundamental right to education), mid-day meals, supplementary nutrition (ICDS) and scholarships. These directives raise a number of ethical as well as practical questions, besides violating children’s right to education, nutrition and...

-The Hindu Business Line It should have considered universal basic income. But sadly, budgets are not seen as a means to meet socio-economic goals The Union Budget attracts considerable media hype and debate. Democracy, if understood as a contract between the state and its citizens, may have to use the budgetary process to ensure not only prosperity for all, but justice or fairness to the most disadvantaged among them as well. A rational...