-The Economic Times BENGALURU: As the central government devolves more fiscal freedom to the states, they seem to be cutting allocations to social sectors, especially agriculture and allied areas in response, according to the initial findings of a study. The Narendra Modi administration wants to empower states further as part of a push toward cooperative federalism. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's February budget cut allocations to the states by more than half in...

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...

-IANS A resurgent Rahul Gandhi and the suicide of a farmer at an AAP rally in the capital seem to have made the NDA government re-think its strategy on the land acquisition bill and put it on the backburner - at least for now. Desperately trying to fight the "anti-farmer" tag, the government, which went into a huddle soon after a farmer committed suicide at the April 22 rally of Delhi chief...

-The Asian Age The much-quoted sentence, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics", was attributed to the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by American author Mark Twain. Although researchers could never find such a statement in any written work of Disraeli, the sentence gained universal popularity to signify how economists and other number-crunchers use the "persuasive power" of figures to make a political point or...

-Frontline   The BJP-led NDA government has, in the two Budgets it has presented so far, revealed itself to be very different from the pro-farmer image that its leading election campaigner and now Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, projected. THE Bharatiya Janata Party's manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha election states: "Agriculture is the engine of India's economic growth and the largest employer, and BJP commits highest priority to agriculture growth, increases in...