-The Hindu Low output and land fragmentation are critical issues, says survey Tamil Nadu: The writing on the wall for Tamil Nadu in agriculture is pretty clear, though the State's grain production during 2013-14 was good. The latest Economic Appraisal of the government has shown that Tamil Nadu needs out-of-the-box policies to tackle agriculture production and its impact on food inflation. The State did well in 2013-14 to bounce back from a nightmare drought...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The proposed Rangarajan method on measurement of poverty in India borrows elements from three earlier methods - those of Alagh, Lakdawala and Tendulkar. An important departure in the Rangarajan method is to compute the poverty line commodity basket by combining items from two fractile groups to address the relatively higher expenses for some essential non-food items. This, while being statistically plausible, poses a behavioural dilemma, as there...

-DNA The aim is to drive farmers out of agriculture and turn food production into industrial enterprise Some years ago, former President APJ Abdul Kalam was addressing students at an annual event organised by K Govindacharya's Bhartiya Swabhiman Andolan at Gulbarga in Karnataka. He exhorted students to work hard, educate themselves to become doctors, engineers, civil servants, scientists, economists and entrepreneurs. After he had ended his talk, a young student got...

-Live Mint Govt schools in Bihar test grouping children by level of learning instead of age for improving outcomes Jehanabad (Bihar): It's just after breakfast and barefoot children trickle into the classroom. Brightly coloured posters adorn the white walls-the solar system, a counting and phonetic chart, parts of the body, and a portrait of a radiant B.R. Ambedkar, a builder of modern India. It looks like any other government school classroom. But...

-Outlook More government took Himachal near the top of development indices In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, the buzz around the so-called ‘Gujarat model' was such that without really knowing what it stood for, everyone wanted it. ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance' is as close as one could get in terms of concrete proposals. However, when one looks at the achievements of Gujarat, the buzz turns to a whimper (see...