-The Hindu Business Line Bihar village gives up fertilisers/ pesticides for eco-agriculture On World Environment Day last year — which happened to be one of the hottest summer mornings — as we stood on the main road roughly a kilometre from Kedia village, in the Jamui district of Bihar, we heard loud voices in the distance. Soon we found 50-60 children marching and shouting in unison, ‘Jeevit maati... jeevit khet!’ (alive is the...

-Bloomberg When farmers in the scorched village of Horti in Western India were struggling to raise money for a canal, they turned to an unlikely source: a crowdfunding website called FuelADream. The farmers had never heard of crowdfunding before, but a local non-profit group suggested the site and helped them write a proposal that explained how a canal would help feed local families. Within weeks, they had raised Rs 300,000 ($4,490) from...

-The Indian Express The Goods and Services Tax (GST), the biggest reform in India’s indirect tax structure since the economy began to be opened up 25 years ago, at last looks set to become reality. The Constitution (122nd) Amendment Bill comes up in Rajya Sabha today, on the back of a broad political consensus and boosted by the ‘good wishes’ of the Congress, which holds the crucial cards on its passage....

-The Indian Express The incentive structure, currently skewed in favour of rice and wheat, needs to become crop-neutral High prices of pulses are upsetting the food budget of many poor families. Soaring retail prices of dals — urad at Rs. 170/kg, tur/arhar at Rs160/kg, gram/chickpea at Rs 127/kg, moong at Rs 111/kg and masoor at Rs 100/kg — have made dal a luxury for the dal-bhaat and dal-roti eating population. But not...

-TheWire.in Policy makers should conduct deeper analysis on the many subtle factors that shape inflation and its effects on the Indian economy. In 1923 when Rudolf von Havenstein, the president of the German Reichsbank (later known as the Deutsche Bundesbank), recklessly initiated a money printing drive in response to the German government’s demand to spend more money, Germany was inevitably embroiled in a bout of hyperinflation and its worst crisis of the...