-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-The Indian Express Subsidy for crop insurance is preferable to fertiliser, power or farm credit. But Centre should bear the full cost for the scheme. A well-conceived and pro-farmer crop insurance scheme — the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) — is faced with the prospect of going the fertiliser subsidy way. Just as in the latter’s case, the benefits from subsidy on crop premiums, too, seems to be going primarily...

-Livemint.com The government did not visualize there were problems in the way it was designed, the methodology itself was faulty Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the flagship programme launched with much fanfare in 2016, has run into rough weather. With both the area covered and the number of enrolled farmers declining, the country’s premium crop insurance scheme is certainly in need of an overhaul. While Parliament’s committee on estimates, chaired by senior...

-Huffingtonpost.in Secrecy in amending the RTI Act as well as in the appointment of Information Commissioners in the CIC reveal the government's intention to destroy the spirit of the transparency law. With over 6 million information applications filed every year, the Indian Right to Information (RTI) Act is the most extensively used transparency legislation globally. The law has empowered ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable. It has been used for a...

-The Hindu The former Chief Election Commissioner on the EVM controversy, why the Supreme Court’s verdict on criminals in politics is a missed opportunity, and electoral bonds The debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines (EVMs) refuses to settle, with political parties continuing to voice their concerns about malfunctioning machines. Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi explains how EVMs work, why he is disappointed with the Supreme Court for refusing to...