-Business Standard Successors to Millennium Development Goals should be achievable - and clearly written "By 2030 reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births." Everyone understands what this statement means. It is simple, comprehensible, concise, specific and quantifiable. In September 2015, the Milennium Development Goals, or MDGs, will be replaced by sustainable development goals, or SDGs. There are several parallel channels flowing into SDG formulation. One...

-Business Standard Swadeshi Jagran Manch asked the Centre to come out with a comprehensive land use policy instead of a piecemeal approach to the issue The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) affiliated economic policy group, along with Communist Party of India (CPI) affiliated All India Kisan Sabha on Tuesday made common cause in criticising the land Bill brought by the Narendra Modi government. In its presentation to the parliamentary...

-The Hindu   Far from being ‘useless’, the MNREGA helps the impoverished and resilient poor earn a decent living. Famously on the floor of Parliament, Prime Minister Modi dismissed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) as a ‘living monument’ of the previous governments’ failures, condemning millions of impoverished people to survive by ‘digging ditches’. This spring near Bhim in Rajasthan, I had the rare experience of labouring on an MGNREGA site....

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A joint parliamentary panel examining the Narendra Modi government's land acquisition bill has been flooded with objections to the proposed legislation from those who have deposed before it so far, sources have said. The Confederation of Indian Industry is the only one among 34 individuals and organisations to have supported the changes the bill seeks to make to the current law, passed in December 2013 under UPA rule,...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...