-The Indian Express     Policy design should worry less about public versus private, and more about choice and accountability. The most noteworthy aspect of the Aam Aadmi Party's manifesto is the explicit focus on service delivery. This is what its government will be evaluated on, and attention has shifted from the AAP's political success to how it will deliver on these promises. The ideas below reflect learnings from over a decade of research...

In its latest report, the Statistical Year Book, India 2014 conveys that India is clearly on track to attain the MDG-2 (achieve universal primary education) and MDG-8 (develop a global partnership for development). However, the results are either mixed or poor in terms of India's performance in achieving the rest of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The chart below provides the MDG scenario from a bird's eye view.   The new...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Access to education beyond higher secondary schooling is a mere 10% among the university-age population in India. This is the finding of a report "Intergenerational and Regional Differentials in Higher Education in India" authored by development economist, Abusaleh Shariff of the Delhi-based Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy and Amit Sharma, research analyst of the National Council of Applied Economic Research. The report...

-The Indian Express Kutch (Gujarat): Bhajan Singh, 62, remembers the time curious villagers turned up to see a borewell his father Gopal Singh had dug up. The year was 1969 and it was the first time Sumrasar village, near Bhuj in Kutch district, had had a borewell. Few had ever seen it work, as they depended entirely on rainwater for the barely one crop they harvested a year. Originally from Pakistan, Gopal...

-The Indian Express Agricultural GDP is underestimated due to inaccurate non-cereal data. It started with a mundane question: what is the chicken population in India? There are glaring inconsistencies in the available data. The National Sample Survey Organisation's (NSSO's) surveys show a 20 per cent annual growth of chicken consumption between 2005 and 2010. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the production of chicken meat only rose 10 per...