-Down to Earth Farmers yet to be paid Rs 5,724 crore for claims made in 5 years since scheme launch The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (crop insurance scheme) may have benefitted some farmers but insurance companies surely made the most of it. In the five years since the scheme was launched, these companies received Rs 1,26,521 crore in premium payments and paid Rs 87,320 crore to farmers in loss claims — a...

-The Hindu Pressing need to improve and harmonise the population estimation methods: Environment Minister From December, India will move to a system that will count tigers and elephants as part of a common survey. The tiger survey is usually held once in four years and elephants are counted once in five years. According to the most recent 2018-19 survey, there were 2,997 tigers in India. According to the last count in 2017,...

-The Telegraph Inequality remains integral to India’s growth story This year marks three decades of market-friendly economic reforms introduced in 1991 by the P.V. Narasimha Rao administration. Manmohan Singh was considered the mastermind behind breaking the shackles of the license-permit raj, an inefficient government, a stifled private sector, and a strictly controlled import regime. All these led to low economic growth, large incidence of poverty, an inefficient, unwieldy public sector, and pervasive...

-NDTV.com Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien said the ministers had dodged the real issues in their press conference. New Delhi: A special press conference by eight Union Ministers was little more than "faff", Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien said on Thursday, countering accusations that the opposition had forced the monsoon session of parliament to end two days prematurely. Brushing away their allegations as bluster, Mr O'Brien pitched eight questions to the ministers ranging...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...