-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 New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented PRIvacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...

-TheWire.in The Narendra Modi government's push to have research institutions depend less on public funds has been turned into a bad idea by the government's own PRIorities. “Innovate, patent, produce, prosper.” PRIme Minister Narendra Modi delivered these words in his inaugural address at the 107th Indian Science Congress, now underway in Bengaluru. Modi’s prescription (first advanced in early 2018) describes a straightforward path to success but it also quietly assumes an environment and...

-The Indian Express Five years down the line, official data shows that the progress of SAGY has been sluggish — about two-thirds of Lok Sabha MPs are yet to select gram panchayats under Phase-4 of the scheme. In his first Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort in 2014, PRIme Minister Narendra Modi had announced the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana (SAGY) as part of nation-building, urging Lok Sabha MPs...

-The Telegraph The power of Keynes’s multiplier process is not absolute An eminent economist observed recently in a national daily’s blog that in spite of the Indian economy’s periodic hiccups, there is no serious threat to the system. “[H]istory,” he asserts, “should give us some pause as we assess the prospects of (the) Indian economy in the medium to long run. There is no denying that the economy is going through a...