-The Indian Express Agriculture’s contribution to poverty reduction is five times more than that of metropolitan centres Speaking at the third BRICS Urbanisation Forum in Visakhapatnam on September 14, Deputy Chairman of the Niti Ayog, Arvind Panagariya, announced that “Without cities we can’t grow rapidly”. He added, “urbanisation plays an important role in poverty alleviation”. Both claims are exaggerated and somewhat misleading. A recent report prepared for the UN points out that, over...

-The Hindu Even safety measures and educational qualification of their teaching staff will have to be disclosed Bengaluru: Schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will now have to disclose key details including fees, infrastructure, safety measures and educational qualification of their teaching staff. This information has to be uploaded on both, the school as well as the CBSE board’s websites. In a circular issued by the Deputy Secretary Affiliation,...

-DNA India is effectively the first country to mandate a minimum CSR spend. How to make use of it. Malnutrition is one of the many problems arising from uneven distribution of resources that plague the country today. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that 194.6 million people in the country are undernourished. It is ironic that one of the largest economies in the world is also a home to...

-The Hindu Business Line The NITI Aayog should revive district-level planning in order to implement the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution While the Planning Commission, which was virtually an executive arm of the Union government, stands abolished, the District Planning Committee (DPC), a constitutional institution mandated “to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole” with a focus on resource endowments, environmental conservation, infrastructural development and spatial...

-Hindustan Times Engineering appears to be losing its attraction as a top career option among Indians. The number of students getting admitted to government and private engineering colleges and institutes — excluding IITs and NITs — is recording a steady decline, by at least 100,000 in the past two years. Barely half of the number of seats across the country got filled last year. The All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) discussed the worrying...