-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Livemint.com In the debate about Muslims and the uniform civil code, the idea of female choice is not considered, says Aakar Patel The upper-caste Gujarati version of bigamy is called maitri karar, meaning friendship document. Saying that people in Ahmedabad were “opting for it”, a 2013 report in India Today described it thus: “The document is in fact little more than a promise of friendship and companionship between a man and...

-The Hindu Business Line How the Indian State metamorphosed from protector of the poor to facilitator of the private health industry If there is correlation between two incidents of the Central Government announcing cuts in the health budget and dengue patients being refused treatment in Delhi’s private hospitals, it is rarely discussed in the ongoing media debate on the subject. A new collection of researched essays edited by public health scholar Imrana...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The current spike in pulse prices could have been anticipated, but India's cereal-centric food security policies emphasize rice and wheat while dis-incentivizing the production of pulses despite clear trends that show a declining preference for cereals. Even though India's dependency on imported pulses grew as imports rose from 2.7 million tonnes in 2010-11 to over four million tonnes this year, minimum support price-driven procurement and the...

-Business Standard Says the actual poverty is much higher than suggested by the multilateral lender, adding there is lack of scientific basis in computing the poverty line The government has contested the World Bank's recently released data that showed only 12.4 per cent of India's population was poor in 2011-12, considering an expenditure cut-off of $1.9 a person a day on purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. It said the actual poverty was...