-The Indian Express The existing MSP-based procurement system is fiscally unsustainable. The time has come to consider market intelligence-based regulation of crop production Farmers are always in distress when prices of their produce are subdued. The response of governments, obviously prompted by political pressures, has been to sharply hike minimum support prices (MSP) of crops or declare loan waivers. Thus, the current government at the Centre has significantly raised the MSPs of...

-The Indian Express In Chhattisgarh, the BJP accused govt of “imposition of this idea” on those who “do not eat non-vegetarian food”. In MP, where the Congress does not enjoy a clear majority on its own, the party is PLAying safe Bhopal/ Raipur: Two states where the Congress came to power last month appear to be on two different PLAtes over one ingredient in the mid-day meal scheme for children: the...

-The Indian Express Wilima Wadhwa, director, ASER Centre, said it is possible that the gender gap in Mathematics is reinforced by existing perceptions on mathematical ability of girls. While the Annual Status of Education Report (Rural), 2018 – or ASER – shows that the percentage of girls out of school is shrinking, it reports a gender divide in basic Math learning levels across age categories, which steadily increases as the children...

-The Hindu The Coastal Regulation Zone notification of 2018 increases the vulnerability of coastal people to climate disasters The National Democratic Alliance government has unleashed several extremely unimaginative developmental policies that target areas that have retained some degree of ecological value to turn them into sites for industrial production. This is despite evidence of the damaging effects of such policies. The latest instance of this is the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification...

-CaravanMagazine.in What the Modi economy has done to farmers On his way to the prime ministership in 2014, Narendra Modi promised that, if his Bharatiya Janata Party won power, the government would raise the minimum support prices paid for crops such as rice and wheat to guarantee farmers a 50-percent profit on their production costs. The benchmark was first proposed by the Swaminathan Commission, formed in 2004 to address farmers’ economic plight,...