-The Telegraph Govt. views detection as a sign of better disease management The rise in the number of recorded leprosy cases from 86,147 (in 2013-14) to 90,709 (2017-18), reported a decade and a half after India was declared leprosy-free in 2005, has turned the spotlight on the hotspots for the disease. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has set the goal of zero children with leprosy and deformities by 2020, and less than one...

Against the backdrop of the Finance Minister Shri Piyush Goyal announcing the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKSN) programme during his budget speech on 1st February, 2019, it becomes essential to differentiate between 12.56 crore operational holding households (enumerated, as per the Agriculture Census) and 13.33 crore ownership holding households (estimated, as per the 70th round National Sample Survey report no. 571) pertaining to size upto 2 hectares. In his budget...

-TheWire.in P.C. Mohanan and J.V. Meenakshi – the only two non-government members of the commission – tendered their resignations because of the body's ineffectiveness. New Delhi: The only two non-government members of India’s National Statistical Commission have resigned, leaving just chief statistician Pravin Srivastava and NITI Aayog’s Amitabh Kant at the head of a body that is the apex advisory organisation for all of the country’s core statistical activities. According to sources with...

-The Hindu Business Line ‘Centre has presented 5 full-fledged Budgets, does not have the legitimacy for a sixth’ The Congress alleged on Thursday that the Centre is planning to present a full-fledged Budget violating all Parliamentary conventions, procedures and traditions. It maintained that the Narendra Modi government neither has the “electoral mandate” nor the “electoral legitimacy” to present six full Budgets in five years. Talking to reporters, former minister and senior Congress spokesperson...

-TheWire.in Aquifers at all levels are being depleted. There is thus an urgent need to review and enact the long-pending model groundwater bill. As winter tips into summer, the next round of water struggles will begin. By February, hand pumps across rural India will start going dry. People in urban centres, mostly small towns living off small stores of groundwater, will start getting increasingly erratic supply. The government will once again initiate...