-The Indian Express Defence is a national public good. It is the primary responsibility of the Centre. The amendment to the terms of reference (TOR) issued to the Fifteenth Finance Commission asking it to examine “..a sepaRATe mechanism for funding of defence and internal security ought to be set up and if so, how such a mechanism could be opeRATionalised,” has triggered some suggestions on the need to have a relook...

-The Hindu Putting more money in the hands of rural households will stir up the economy The government’s statistical machinery has begun work on revising the indices that capture the trends in consumer prices experienced in rural India. This opens up the prospect for an upward revision in the wages paid out to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The current national average wage is just about...

-Hindustan Times India’s obsession with keeping food prices low, even when there’s no inflationary pressure, has long hurt farm incomes Farming is gloriously uncertain, thanks not just to uncertain weather, but also unpredictable policies. Let’s zoom into the finances of Bhupinder Pal Singh, a horticulturist from Babbain, a village in Haryana, a state that counts itself among the first places where India’s Green Revolution of 1960s began. In good years, Singh would earn...

-Newsclick.in This bounty for corpoRATe houses comes at a time when common people are reeling under a slowdown, joblessness is at record levels and incomes are stagnating. Continuing her series of press conferences, that are becoming like a treasure hunt for corpoRATes, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced today that corpoRATe tax RATes will be slashed from the current 30% (average) to 25.17% including all cess/surcharge. Actually, if no other concession is availed...

Almost one in every five suicides in the world is committed by self-poisoning with pesticide, which mostly occur in rural, agricultural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), states a new publication entitled 'Preventing Suicide: A resource for pesticide registrars and regulators'. Published jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the booklet says that the adoption of green revolution technology...