-Press Information Bureau/ Ministry of Finance Economic Outlook, Prospects and Policy Challenges Macroeconomic fundamentals in 2014-15 have dramatically improved. Highlights are: * Inflation has declined by over 6 percentage points since late 2013. * The current account deficit has declined from a peak of 6.7 percent of GDP (in Q3, 2012-13) to an estimated 1.0 percent in the coming fiscal year. * Foreign portfolio flows have stabilized the rupee, exerting downward pressure on long-term interest...

-The Telegraph Prithla (Haryana): The noise from the factories and traffic cannot drown out the slogan resonating along the Delhi-Mathura highway, demanding a right to land for all and the scrapping of the land acquisition ordinance. "Sabki bhuk mitana hai to bhumi grahan ardhyadesh radh karo, bhumi samasya hal karo (To remove hunger, dump the ordinance and solve the problem of the landless)," goes the chant. Some 5,000 landless people and marginal farmers...

-The Indian Express Recently, the Central government invited comments on its Draft National Health Policy (DNHP). The DNHP provides an exhaustive coverage of health issues and challenges facing this much neglected sector. Its major recommendations are making health a justiciable right and denial of care an offence; provisioning of health services through a strengthened public health delivery system in partnership with the private sector; enhancing public spending from the current level...

-Oxfam Blog Vanita Suneja, Oxfam India's Economic Justice Lead, argues that India can't progress until it tackles rural poverty. This entry was posted on 3 February 2015. More than 800 million of India's 1.25 billion people live in the countryside. One quarter of rural India's population is below the official poverty line - 216 million people. A search for economic justice for a population of this magnitude is never going to be...

-The Indian Express ONE of the late R.K. Laxman's best cartoons from the mid-1960's portrays a smiling food minister looking out of a window at a heavy monsoon downpour saying, "This year we can tell the Americans to go to hell." Fifty years ago, a good monsoon meant that that year, India was not dependent on food aid and wouldn't have to go hat in hand to the Americans for food...