-The Hindu Business Line Pune: Will the interlinking of rivers mitigate drought and the effects of floods? Yes, says the Centre. Notwithstanding the debates on the merits and demerits of the plan, the Ministry of Water Resources wants to take forward the interlinking of rivers. “Interlinking of rivers can play a major role in water management in the country,” the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation told the Rajya...

-Frontline.in A closer look at the Congress party’s proposed income transfer scheme. “Two Indias are being created. One of the rich and the other of the poor… we are going to bridge these two Indias. And we are going to make sure that this one India that is formed has opportunity for all…. The idea is that you take the India of opportunity, you grow that India. Then you take some of...

-Newsclick.in The arguments put forward by the two government advocates to disparage the NSSO’s thwarted report only serve to create a smokescreen so that any meaningful debate on unemployment becomes impossible. In 1965, P. C. Mahalanobis, who founded India’s modern statistical system, wrote a famous article titled “Statistics as a Key Technology” in the journal The American Statistician. One argument in the paper was as follows. Prior to the emergence of science...

-The Indian Express An urban employment guarantee programme is an idea whose time has come. Temperatures are rapidly warming up in what promises to be a blistering summer of India’s electioneering. Amidst the belligerent grandstanding on national security and the communal messaging barely below the surface, Rahul Gandhi’s announcement of a minimum income guarantee scheme came as a relief, if only because it tried to steer the public discussions to the...

-The Indian Express Congress may be talking to economists and experts. But is it listening to the voter? Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s plan for a “surgical strike on poverty” is built around some key numbers: Rs 12,000, the target minimum monthly income for a household; 5 crore households (amounting to 20 per cent of all Indian households); Rs 6,000, their average monthly earning; and therefore, Rs 6,000, the monthly amount required...