-The Indian Express The Bill provides for “surveillance, inspection, operation and maintenance of specified dams for prevention of dam failure related disasters and to provide for institutional mechanism to ensure their safe functioning”. New Delhi: WHEN THE government introduced the Dam Safety Bill, 2018 in Lok Sabha last week, BJD floor leader Bhartruhari Mahtab questioned Parliament’s competence to do so. Days later, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami wrote to the...

-The Telegraph Market prices too low, and trucking product to procurement centres not viable Bolpur (Birbhum) and Calcutta: A paddy challenge has sprouted for Bengal’s farmers with market rates dipping and sales to the state government at the minimum support price running into hurdles. Sources said the price for a quintal of kharif (monsoon) paddy was hovering between Rs 1,450 and Rs 1,500 in the market, which leaves them with hardly any profit...

Just a few days ahead of the Kisan Mukti March in Delhi NCR, the provisional results of the Agriculture Census 2015-16 became available in the public domain. The report, among other things, highlights the long-term problems affecting Indian agriculture including fragmentation of land holdings (particularly the marginal and small ones) and shrinking average size of farm land. The provisional results of the latest Agriculture Census reveal that at the national level...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-ThePrint.in India’s rights watchdog NHRC — labelled ‘toothless tiger’ — is swamped with cases but has little resources to address them. This, despite an ‘A’ rating from UN body. New Delhi: On paper, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which turned 25 last week, is a success story. In February, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), a UN body based in Geneva, re-accredited India’s apex rights watchdog with the ‘A’...