-TheWire.in Government documents and budget data reveal that the prime minister's feet-washing act is just optics. On Sunday, a video uploaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his personal Twitter account showed him washing the feet of four safai karamacharis in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Within two hours, 19,000 Twitter users had liked it, 7,200 had retweeted it and 1,700 had commented on the link. Uploading the video, Modi had tweeted that washing the...
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Why the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme will be hard to implement -Priscilla Jebaraj
-The Hindu * What does the scheme offer? The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme, announced in the Budget earlier this month, aims to give ?6,000 a year to 12 crore farmer families who own up to two hectares of cultivable land. * What are the challenges? The number of beneficiaries comes from the number of land holdings of two hectares or less, according to the last agricultural land census. However, the guidelines say...
More »India's declining sex ratio: Numbers are not the only deceptive thing
-The Telegraph There is a need to look beyond education as the means to counter the bias against girls Numbers seldom tell their own story faithfully. The civil registration system of birth and deaths in 2016 reveals that there has been a steep decline in the sex ratio at birth in the southern states, known for their high literacy rates. In 2016, Andhra Pradesh ranked with Rajasthan with 806 girls per 1,000...
More »There's a hole in the data -Kiran Bhatty & Dipa Sinha
-The Indian Express The state has failed to create capacities for a timely, reliable, decentralised data regime. The credibility of India’s data systems is under serious threat with the recent controversy over the employment data of the National Sample Survey. While the Census of India and the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) have a good reputation, when it comes to data related to the social sector — health, education, nutrition —...
More »The solution is universal -Rajendran Narayanan & Debmalya Nandy
-The Hindu Strengthening the MGNREGA would be more prudent than a targeted cash transfer plan like PM-KISAN Rural distress has hit unprecedented levels. According to news reports, unemployment is the highest in 45 years. To allay some misgivings of the distress, one of the announcements in the Budget speech was that “vulnerable landholding farmer families, having cultivable land up to 2 hectares, will be provided direct income support at the rate of...
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