-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-Down to Earth System of crop intensification, specially in rice, has shown sizeable savings in water and seed usage. Yet its adoption has not spread despite incentives SIMPLE TECHNIQUES and manag-ement practices tend to be viewed with suspicion. In the age of input-intensive agriculture which calls for an array of machinery and a host of scientific props, a crop management system whose core basically is protecting the plant's roots to provide better...

-Economic and Political Weekly State intervention in India to expand financial inclusion to rural areas has had an interesting history. It has moved away from building state-led institutions to setting policy that pushed financial inclusion through non-state agencies as well. While identity, de-duplication, and authentication were issues that affected the pace of financial inclusion, they were not the most significant problems to be fixed. By allowing the Aadhaar project to set...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...

-Economic and Political Weekly     In exploring the link between food price inflation and rising rural real wages, this paper examines the dynamic relations between rural wages in different sectors and the relationship these wages share with increasing food prices. It looks into the possibility of a Lewsian transformation causing an increase in real rural wages, but the result of the analysis suggests that the rise in wages is because of an...