-The Hindu Business Line Such computation will underestimate GDP, says the former Chief Statistician The National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) recent study involving samples from the MCA-21 database has put the whole GDP computation methodology under fire, but on a wrong basis, according to former Chief Statistician of India Pronab Sen. The NSSO study had revealed that there are several more shell companies in the system than what the Centre realised. Having numerous...

-The Hindu How India can shift its agriculture from a high-yield ideal to a high-value one When the news broke that PepsiCo was suing small farmers in India for growing a potato variety that is used in its Lay’s chips, popular sympathies immediately went, of course, to the farmers. National and international pressure swiftly mounted, and in short order a humbled PepsiCo backtracked, announcing its withdrawal of the lawsuit. There was global...

-The Hindu Business Line India’s Protection of PLAnt Varieties Act spells out rights of farmers vis-a-vis breeders, which resulted in a pushback for PepsiCo The Protection of PLAnt Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act (PPVFRA), which introduced intellectual property protection in Indian agriculture, faced its biggest test in its implementation phase of nearly a decade and a half, when PepsiCo India initiated legal proceedings against four farmers in Gujarat for “illegally” growing...

-The Hindu The exclusion of migrants from the electoral process reveals the caste- and class-driven nature of mainstream politics While political commentators have been busy analysing voter preferences in the general election 2019, one segment, namely migrants, continues to be overlooked. The Election Commission of India (EC), on February 21, clarified that NRI voters cannot cast votes online, and that an NRI who holds an Indian passport can vote in his/her hometown after...

-The Telegraph Supreme Court has rejected a review petition by 21 Opposition parties seeking paper slip counts on 50 per cent of VVPAT devices New Delhi: The PLAn to tally paper slips with the votes registered on 20,625 of the 10.35 lakh electronic machines deployed nationwide cannot guarantee the integrity of the electoral process against targeted tampering or machine malfunction, specialists have said. They have added that different sizes of random counts in...