-The Hindu Business Line The entire tea industry in India faces an uncertain future. And young people don’t want to work in tea gardens anymore After a steady run for nearly a decade, the tea industry is now facing tough times. Both, production of gardens in the organised sector and leaf prices are virtually stagnating. And exports no longer hold out much promise. Between January and July this year, all-India production was 553.21...

-Scroll.in   An audit of ration shops after the introduction of Aadhaar revealed that many genuine beneficiaries couldn’t collect food grain due to system glitches. The Modi government’s insistence on the use of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, to weed out “ghosts, fakes, duplicates” from social welfare schemes is counterproductively excluding genuine beneficiaries from the programmes. In Andhra Pradesh, an official audit conducted after ration shops adopted the Aadhaar system revealed that many...

-The Hindu Forced dietary restriction has no place here. In the current battle for Bihar, caste has emerged as a more potent weapon than religion. There may be some churning among urban youth on caste-based quotas, their stated views depending not just on whether they have benefited from the present system but also on how they wish to be perceived — as pragmatic or forward-looking?. But cutting across the urban-rural divide, slicing through...

-The Hindu Business Line Our pulses trade and output policies are made with the wrong ingredients The present spike in prices of pulses is a fallout of both structural and short-term factors. Years of flawed production and trade policies, along with the absence of technological breakthroughs to improve yields, have led to stagnation in output. The retail prices of pulses have galloped along at a faster rate ever since the fourth advance...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government is planning an innovative strategy to use the approximately 4.5 lakh engineering and polytechnic seats that stay vacant every year to teach skill training courses. The plan, which is at a preliminary stage with approvals needed to make it actionable, aims to plug the skills gap, provide options for youth who might be falling out of any kind of professional or academic training, and...