-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...

-Scroll.in Hike government spending, pour money into rural areas, cut interest rates, refrain from disruptive moves like demonetisation. India’s economic growth is slowing but can the government bring it back on track? This is what Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reportedly discussed with ministers and officials Tuesday evening. While a concrete plan to address the problem is apparently being developed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s blessing, a section of the industry and...

-FIRstpost.com Have women living in rural India benefitted from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGA)? MNREGA was introduced in 2006 and has emerged as the largest programme in the world for providing employment to the rural poor. While there is no doubt that MNREGA in a short span of ten years did help generate 20 billion person-days of employment benefitting 276 million workers from which more than half were women....

-The Indian Express With the scheme floundering, the Centre is now planning to shift focus to district-level schemes to yield better results in the short-term for its skilling initiative. The government’s flagship skilling scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), is struggling to achieve end-results. Data for the PMKVY scheme until the FIRst week of July 2017 reveals that out of a total 30.67 lakh candidates who had been trained or...

-The Indian Express Cash transfers instead of food has been widely debated with several criticising it for not being an actual substitute for take-home rations, which is a mix of cereals, fats, sugar and pulses, with added micronutrients. In a major policy shift, the Ministry of Woman and Child Development (WCD) has prepared a proposal to substitute take-home rations, given in aanganwadis for infants under three and pregnant and lactating mothers,...