-The Hindu None of our Teacher Education programmes has ever seriously tried to achieve a clear and convincing enough understanding of what one tries to achieve through education. It always has been a rhetoric of larger aims and working for myopically understood parental and market aspirations All curricula are situated in contexts and are simultaneously guided by ideals. Therefore, an understanding of and a balance between the two is essential. We have succeeded...

-The Indian Express The Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of agricultural households, released last week by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), is the second one ever to be done. The SAS of 2003 was necessitated by the agrarian crisis of the time. Farmer suicides had reached a peak, and the reference year for the survey, 2002-2003, had seen severe drought. The agricultural sector was in crisis, with Growth rates slowing to...

-Economic and Political Weekly   This paper counters negative advocacy about the food subsidy, the public distribution system, and farm price supports. It argues that the public food supply chain for market intervention has a favourable impact on the cost-benefit ratio, poverty reduction, calorie consumption by the poor and productivity-led agricultural Growth. The paper proposes reforms for the six pillars of the public food supply chain. These include: an alternative poverty line...

-The Indian Express In an article in these columns (‘A fertile mess', IE, December 11), Ashok Gulati says India has landed its fertiliser industry in a mess because of rising subsidies, lagging investment, unbalanced use of fertilisers and diversion of urea for other uses, among other things. He blames it all on administered pricing and subsidy costs, and advocates the increase of urea prices or cash transfer of the fertiliser subsidy...

-Reuters   The government has ordered a cut of nearly 20% in its 2014-15 healthcare budget due to fiscal strains, putting at risk key disease control initiatives in a country whose public spending on health is already among the lowest in the world. Two health ministry officials told Reuters on Tuesday that more than 60 billion rupees, or $948 million, has been slashed from their budget allocation of around $5 billion for the...