-The Hindu Despite limitations, the use of randomised control trials has led to a paradigm shift in development policy evaluation If Rip Van Winkle was an academic economist and woke up from a two-decade long sleep this week, he would be baffled by the news of the Nobel Prize in Economics this year awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for pioneering the use of randomised control trials (RCTs) in...

-The New Indian Express According to the central bank’s RTI reply, 3,542.991 million notes of Rs 2,000 were printed during the financial year 2016-17. NEW DELHI: Have you been wondering why the ATMs have been barely dispensing Rs 2,000 notes for last few months? That’s because the printing of the high-value note has been stopped, the Reserve Bank of India informed this newspaper in reply to an RTI query.     The Bharatiya Reserve Bank...

-Outlook Experts say Zero Budget Natural Farming defies logic that it will involve no financial cost. Imbalance between yield and price could even lead to food shortage in future Au Naturel * Zero-budget natural farming relies on savings on chemical inputs like fertilisers and insecticides * As health consciousness grows, there’s a demand for natural/organic produce * ZBNF relies on cow dung and urine for seed treatment, improving yield * Scientists fear ZBNF may lead to...

-Press release of 4th All India Media Conference, dated 8 October, 2019 Udaipur, Oct. 8: More than 300 media practitioners, researchers, scholars and educationists from different states of India and from four foreign countries took a pledge to empower the underprivileged sections of society by ending the digital divide and create new opportunities to highlight the issues of common people, rural areas, landless labourers, malnourished children and farmers affected by climate...

Almost one in every five suicides in the world is committed by self-poisoning with pesticide, which mostly occur in rural, agricultural areas of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), states a new publication entitled 'Preventing Suicide: A resource for pesticide registrars and regulators'. Published jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the booklet says that the adoption of green revolution technology...