-The Hindu The Indian education system would be a good place to start with reforms, says the development economist Jean Drèze is possibly the world’s most famous Belgian-Indian. He has lived in India since 1979, and is an Indian citizen. As a development economist and activist, he has helped draft some startlingly pro-people legislations, such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, and the National Food Security Act, 2013....

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-Hindustan Times The study has analysed the inter-state differences in the quality of life and levels of living across the major states of India. A composite quality of life index has been prepared using 17 indicators, covering various aspects like income and consumption level, quality of housing, health status and educational attainment of the population. Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh is among the least developed states in terms of quality of life, says a...

-Frontline.in Despite its deeply flawed neoliberal perspective, Economic Survey 2017-18 is rich in detail, has many useful analytical discussions at different levels of aggregation, and would serve as a useful resource for students and scholars. When Arvind Subramanian, the present Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance who took office way back in October 2014, presented his first Economic Survey, the one for 2014-15, there was considerable novelty on offer, at...

-The Hindu Analysing data without providing sufficient context is dangerous An inherent challenge in journalism is to meet deadlines without compromising on quality, while sticking to the word limit. However, brevity takes a toll when it comes to reporting on surveys, indexes, and big data. Let me examine three sets of stories which were based on surveys and carried prominently by this newspaper, to understand the limits of presenting data without providing...