-Down to Earth Will the Aayog's vision be any different than the top-down approach of its predecessor, the Planning Commission? WITH THE end of the 12th Five Year Plan on March 31, India’s 65-year tryst with five-year economic Development planning has come to an end. In 2014, when the National Democratic Alliance government scrapped the Planning Commission and replaced it with the National Institute of Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, it announced...

Promises are made to be broken. In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made the promise that if it is elected to the Centre, it will then accord a high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship, among other things. But latest data on unemployment shared by the BJP MP Shri Bandaru Dattatreya in written form while replying to an unstarred question in the...

-VillageSquare.in Recent amendments to laws that govern the use of land owned by tribals in Jharkhand has led to a rash of protests because local communities feel that they might lose their land and livelihoods to industrial Development Last year in May, when the Jharkhand government announced to remove handcuffs from all the statues and pictures of Birsa Munda, the indigenous people of the state lauded the newly appointed first non-tribal chief...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Niti Aayog is throwing open its doors to private sector experts to join the government think tank at all levels, including at secretary rank. Unlike in the past, when the bureaucracy would walk into government organisations, Niti Aayog's policy will ensure that officers have to compete for jobs with applicants from the private sector or academic institutions. Currently, top jobs are virtually reserved for officers from...

-Hindustan Times The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) is facing a shortage of investigators for conducting surveys, a response to an RTI filed by Hindustan Times revealed, raising questions about the quality of data being generated from these surveys. The field operations division of the NSSO, which is responsible for collecting primary data, has around 24% of positions vacant for the posts of junior and senior statistical officers. Data from NSSO is central...