-Livemint.com Panel aims to find ways to diversify risks in farming, examine how integrated farming can boost incomes New Delhi: The central government has set up a panel to suggest ways to double farm incomes by 2022, as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The task of the inter-ministerial committee will prepare a blueprint to transition farm policies from being production oriented to based on incomes or value addition. The committee will look...

-Livemint.com The quality of output and influence in policymaking have been disappointing In order to give a flavour of how important think tanks in Washington DC have been to the policymakers, Peter W. Singer, an American political scientist, once wrote: “...when President Reagan took office in 1981, he quickly gave every member of his cabinet an 1,100-page book from the Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership, that provided an outline for conservative principles...

-The Indian Express The percentage of the adult population for four large developing countries — China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria — who are living in cities, as well as the change in this percentage between 1975 and 2000, are plotted in chart. Rural-urban migration is exceptionally low in India. Changes in the rural and urban population between decennial censuses over the period 1961-2001 indicate that the migration rate for working age...

  Social audit is an important tool not just to ensure transparency and accountability in the MGNREGS, but also for successful running of the programme. The MIS (Management Information System) data provided by the website www.nrega.nic.in reveals that at the national-level roughly one-third of all districts were covered under social audit during the financial year 2015-16, as on 26 March, 2016. The top 5 states during 2015-16 (FY) in terms of the...

Like 2015, this year too unseasonal rainfall and hailstorm have taken the farmers by surprise. Recent media reports suggest that extreme weather event has damaged rabi crops in a number of states from north India. The Weekly Weather Report prepared for the week spanning 10-16 March, 2016, which was issued by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), shows that excessive rainfall was observed in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand,...