-TheWire.in Statistical analysis suggests that farmers in states that have amended the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act are less likely to commit suicide, but further reforms are needed to reduce the incidence of farmer suicides across the country. Every summer, it is the same old story: drought and farmers committing suicide in India. Between 2012 and 2015, over 10,000 farmers killed themselves. Farmer suicides are a major cause of political contention, despite...

-Hindustan Times Days after Hindustan Times reported a data breach of over a million Aadhaar numbers from a Jharkhand government website, at least four more instances of similar leaks on other government websites have come to light. These breaches come at a time when the Supreme Court is hearing a set of petitions challenging a controversial government decision to make it mandatory to seed Permanent Account Numbers (PAN) with Aadhaar numbers for...

-Livemint.com The richest household’s assets are worth much more than that of all the others combined and the same conclusion holds if we take the distribution of rural assets We all know that Credit Suisse reckons that the richest 1% of Indians own 58.4% of the nation’s wealth, up from 36.8% in 2000. What is perhaps not so well-known is that, according to the Credit Suisse report, the bottom 70% of Indians...

-Livemint.com India’s Human Development Index score falls 27 % due to regional disparities in education, health parameters and living standards within the country New Delhi: India’s human development index (HDI) ranking for 2015 puts Asia’s third largest economy among a group of countries classed as “medium” in the list as opposed to “low” in the 1990s, thanks to factors like an increase in life expectancy and mean years of schooling in the...

-The Hindu Unlike the ‘Economic Survey’ proposal, the idea behind a universal basic income is one of redistribution The Economic Survey 2016-17 tabled in Parliament last month has proposed introducing a universal basic income in India, and has devoted an entire chapter to this new idea. A universal and unconditional income transfer to all citizens in order to address the twin problems of poverty and unemployment is undoubtedly a proposal that merits...