-The Times of India Manisha Verma, principal secretary, tribal development department, Maharashtra talks to Sugandha Indulkar about The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 and related issues, with today being World Tribal Day. * What’s the precise positioning of the tribal welfare departments at the Centre and states on FRA? This is a seminal legislation. The preamble to the Act itself states that it aims...

-Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), Working Paper 383 Farmers, especially small and marginal, do not directly trade in agri-futures market in India. Their small size, lack of trust and understanding of futures market and dependence on middlemen, are some of the main deterrents. The role of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) is crucial in this context since they can procure commodities, aggregate them and ensure that size and...

-The Indian Express Helping farmers produce solar energy can help realise the government’s target of doubling farmers’ incomes. In July, two interesting things happened that can help Indian farmers to a large extent in augmenting their incomes. First, the Union Finance Minister (FM) in her maiden budget speech asked why the annadata (farmer) cannot become the urjadata (producer of solar power). Second, in Parliament, the agriculture minister for state, responding to...

-The Hindu The recent PLFS data, which show a historic decline in manufacturing employment, make one fact plain — India desperately needs a comprehensive industrial policy, absent since 1991 The Union Budget suggests that the government has not recognised the need to create more manufacturing jobs. For the first time ever, manufacturing jobs fell in absolute terms between 2011-12 and 2017-18, to quote the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the National...

-The Telegraph Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget spells out the colossal failure that the draft NEP is fated to be In her budget speech on July 5, the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, reiterated the government’s plan of bringing in a new National Education Policy, thereby initiating “major changes in both school and higher education”. Her announcement comes close on the heels of a draft NEP published by the ministry of human resource development in...