-PTI * There is a need for greater flexibility in the Indian education sector across all aspects, he said, calling the system 'very rigid' * He said private schools are 'terrible' from an outcome perspective Mumbai: Education outcomes in state-run schools can be better than the private ones, Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee said on Saturday as he lauded Delhi government schools for "outperforming" their private peers. He said state agencies have been "generous" with...

-Livemint.com News of India recording the world’s most New Year’s Day births seems to have revived talk of a strict population control policy. But there is no need for panic. Nor state intervention. For decades, doomsday theories of our population boom have been used to explainrising poverty and unemployment, food shortages and health crises, environmental degradation and climate change. This New Year’s Day, Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimated that nearly...

-The Telegraph Female labour force participation in India is declining and currently stands at 17.5% Hunger and gender inequality pose two key challenges as India tries to achieve the objectives pledged under the Sustainable Development Goal, a report released by the Niti Aayog said on Monday. India is one of 193 countries that have pledged to end, among other things, poverty, hunger and gender inequality by 2030. Since last year, the Niti Aayog...

-Livemint.com Using India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) as a case study, new research shows social transfers may reduce labour supply, but increase wages A common belief about social transfers is that they make their recipients lazy, decrease labour supply and do not reduce poverty. According to research that examines India’s largest social transfer programme, the public distribution system (PDS), social transfers indeed reduce labour supply but this increases wages and alleviates poverty. In...

-The Indian Express Growing divergence between consumption expenditure estimates from NSO surveys and GDP data is too big to be pushed under the carpet Recently, we had expressed concerns that with the GDP growth rate falling in the post 2011-12 period, the decline in the poverty ratio would be slow. During 2011-12 to 2018-19, both GDP and agriculture growth were lower than in the earlier period. The terms of trade were not...