The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...

-The Telegraph The growing trend of India's super rich shopping offshore for citizenships of convenience Mehul Choksi is not keeping well. Or so the absconding billionaire and uncle to the absconding diamantaire, Nirav Modi, told the Enforcement Directorate when he was asked to appear in a Mumbai court not long ago. It is a pity, for had Choksi been in better health, he would have been able to enjoy his new country,...

-The Indian Express Anganwadi workers, teachers, nurses are paid low salaries, their work devalued Frontline workers providing basic services through various government programmes form the backbone of the country’s social welfare system. India’s ability to achieve its SDGs or to have a healthy skilled workforce that contributes towards economic progress or social and human development depends to a large extent on the performance of teachers, nurses, anganwadi workers, panchayat secretaries and...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

-The Economic Times To observers outside Kerala, Sabarimala is all about misogyny, a misguided mass construing one strand of anti-woman tradition as a pillar of faith. But to those in Kerala, it is increasingly clear that resurgence of caste marks the Sabarimala protests, gender injustice being one element subsumed in that assertion of caste. At the beginning of the 20th century, Kerala’s caste system practised unapproachability. Even proximity could pollute. The Nair...