-The Hindu Greater data availability, especially on labour markets, needed to better gauge social impact of such policies The World Bank has said the social impact of demonetisation may have been greater as the informal economy was likely to have been hit especially hard. However, the Bank said the impact of demonetisation on the informal economy was difficult to measure and greater data availability, especially on labour markets, is needed to...

Much to our surprise, a careful relook at the newly released estimates on farm production from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare would reveal that the foodgrain production during the rabi season is likely to fall by almost 1 million tonne between 2013-14 and 2016-17. Please see chart-1. Amidst the celebration of a bumper harvest in the ongoing crop year, it needs to be explained why the rabi foodgrain output...

-The Times of India Right on the edge of the Ganga basin that spans 11 Indian states lies Naujhil block, a few kilometres west of the Yamuna in UP's Mathura district. You would think this is a blessed location with plentiful water all round. With its 17 tributaries, including the Yamuna, Ganga's catchment area has about 525 billion cubic metres (bcm) of surface water and about 171 bcm of groundwater. On average,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The big red blotch on the Narendra Modi government's report card after three years in power is its dismal performance in job creation - and there are no indications that things will improve in the near future. Cold statistics from the government's labour bureau show that job growth plummeted in key sectors to its lowest levels in eight years in calendar years 2015 and 2016 at 1.55 lakh...

When it comes to child under-nutrition, the proportion of stunted and underweight children below 5 years has reduced in India during the last ten years. However, a rising trend has been observed in the prevalence of wasting among children below 5 years between the last two rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The recently released data from NFHS-4 indicates that the proportion of under 5 year children who are...