-Livemint.com The RBI-commissioned study listed faulty crop choices and aspirational consumption patterns as other major factors for farmer suicides New Delhi: Shame arising out of inability to repay loans taken from relatives and acquaintances is a key reason for farmers resorting to suicide, a study commissioned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found. The study titled “Lives in debt: narratives of agrarian distress and farmer suicides”, conducted by researchers at Shiv Nadar...

-The Hindu Business Line Sees enhanced infra spending, higher consumption New Delhi: While noting that demonetisation of high value currency by the government last year will help bring in more taxpayers into the tax net, the United Nations ESCAP in a new report has said that more measures will be required to fight black money in the future. “The measure did not, by itself, impede future black money flows in new denominations. …...

-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...

-The Economic Times blog In December 1956, Zhou En Lai, the Chinese premier and, after Mao, the second mostpowerful man in China, created much consternation by refusing to leave his meeting at the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) office at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata. He was talking to Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the founder of the institute, and one of the pioneers in the field of survey methods. Zhou was...

-Huffington Post A majority believed that religion (47%) should take precedence over science (33%). Socially conservative, religiously inclined, worried about jobs - a new nationally representative sample survey of India's youth paints a sobering profile of what young people think and want. Ten years after their first such survey, the Delhi-based Centre for the Study in Developing Societies (CSDS) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), a German foundation associated with a political party,...