-The Hindu Business Line Kota Neelima digs into farmer suicide cases to chronicle lives often labelled as collateral damage In last November, when All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, an umbrella organisation of around 190 farmer groups from across the country, organised a Kisan Mukti Sansad in Delhi, there was one event that moved almost everyone of thousands present there. About two dozens children of those farmers who had committed suicide in...

-Down to Earth Jean Dreze argues that we should not leave the making of an equitable society to experts alone What does one make of the shameful statistic that over 200 million Indians still subsist below the poverty line? How does one square it with the equally obscene distinction that we have the world’s fourth largest number of billionaires, thus making India the second most unequal nation after Russia? Indeed, how...

-The Hindu On the need for action-oriented research in development policy A whole new way of looking at poverty and development policy is taking shape in the world of economics. Traditionally understood as meagreness of material resources, there is a growing realisation that poverty also depletes mental resources. Understanding of how poverty impacts behaviour, what the absence of resources does to a person’s mindset can vitaminise the poverty-fighting policy toolkit. Insights, well-designed qualitative...

-The Indian Express The order also pointed out that on April 6, the minister had written to his secretary asking for a self-contained report on how the chief secretary could issue such a direction. However, the report was never filed. Ranchi: Four days after questioning the directions given by the Jharkhand chief secretary on mandatorily linking Aadhaar to ration cards by April 5, state PDS Minister Saryu Roy Saturday passed an order...

-NDTV Jean Dreze's new book, a collection of essays called 'Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone', starts with a beautiful and moving description of what he sees from his office in Ranchi University at the crack of dawn: hundreds of informal sector coal-miners in Ranchi trudging miles with heavy loads of coal they have dug up, often from below the land from which they were forcibly displaced. Dreze quotes...