-The Hindu In a sign of change, mothers wage a relentless battle to get their children admission to the seats reserved for the poor in private schools. New Delhi: In her tiny room with a grey refrigerator and a wall-mounted television set, Babita opens up about her dreams. “My children should learn to speak in English,” she says. Two of her children study in private schools, and another in a government school. Private...

-Business Standard The first two years of the Narendra Modi government were marked by big announcements that will take their time to materialise. The one sector that is unfazed by slogans is agriculture. The sector is crippled by back-to-back droughts coupled with a record fall in farm prices. A slump in global markets meant that agriculture exports, which could provide farmers alternative revenue, dried up. Agriculture and processed food exports from India...

-The Indian Express Punjab’s farmers are losing interest in planting new trees, with prices halving from their peaks. Jalandhar/ Ludhiana: Sandeep Singh Randhawa grew paddy and wheat on his 65-acre land at Talwandi Lal Singh village in Gurdaspur district’s Batala tehsil. That was till the late eighties, when he first planted poplar on the edges of his field. The returns encouraged him to expand the area under these trees — each...

-TheWire.com The government wants to double farmer incomes by 2022, a feat that it cannot achieve without seriously tackling the current slump that has a direct impact on the sale of farming products. As part of its recent budget, the central government announced its aim to double farmers’ incomes by 2022. To this end, the state of agricultural exports is an important factor which needs attention, as it creates an additional demand...

-The Times of India The city's child sex ratio reached an all time high in 2015, with 933 girls born per 1,000 boys, significantly ahead of the national average of 918. But several wards of the city bucked the progressive trend to register a worrying gap. As per recently released BMC data, 11of 24 wards registered a dip in the ratio, indicative of a strong bias towards the male child, compared with...