-PTI Washington: Basu said from 2003 to 2011, India was growing typically over 8 per cent per annum. The year of global crisis, 2008, it dropped briefly to 6.8 per cent, but over 8 per cent growth had become the new norm for India. The downturn in India’s growth is “very worrying”, World Bank’s former chief economist Kaushik Basu said, underscoring that this is the “hefty price” the country had to pay...

-Hindustan Times India’s public expenditure on health is rising, but not as fast as its burgeoning population of 1.3 billion, which grow by 26 million each year It’s not the lack of oxygen that kills hundreds of children in hospitals of Uttar Pradesh each year, it’s India’s abysmal public health delivery system. “Gorakhpur is the symbol of the collapse of the primary health care system. Why should people be forced to travel 200km...

-Livemint.com The caste networks will disappear when the market economy starts to function efficiently The caste system is arguably the most distinctive feature of Indian society. The Indian population is divided into four hierarchical classes, or varnas, with a large sub-population of untouchables excluded entirely from the system. Within each of these classes, and among the untouchables, are thousands of castes, or jatis. The central rule in Hindu society is that individuals...

-The Hindu Fifty years since the Green Revolution, the architect of the reform highlights the crisis facing Indian agriculture today It is 11 years since agronomist M.S. Swaminathan handed over his recommendations for improving the state of agriculture in India to the former United Progressive Alliance government, at the height of the Vidarbha farmer suicides crisis, but they are still to be implemented. To address the agrarian crisis and farmers’ unrest across...

-The Hindu But in absolute terms, Hindus contributed maximum in 2014-15, thanks to larger population, according to National Sample Survey data Hindus donated a little over Rs. 15,600 crore as religious contribution in 2014-15 — six times the quantum donated by Muslims — but the per-household contribution of Muslims is marginally higher than that of Hindus, as they are enjoined by religion to give to charity. But the per-household religious contribution of Christians...