There is some bad news for the world’s largest democracy. Thanks to the vitiated atmosphere induced by troll attacks on scribes on social media, among other things, the country's World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) ranking has fallen two places to 138th position.   Among 180 countries, India ranked 136th last year with a score of 42.94. However, in 2018 it attained 138th position with a score of 43.24 according to the...

-The Hindu Business Line A study of Farmer Producer Organisations in Bihar show mixed results — some successes but several challenges too The government has this lofty goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. Among the different instruments to achieve this goal, promotion of new and scaling up of existing Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have been given focus. Given the extremely small landholdings, FPOs, through collectivisation, which leads to economies of scale, are...

-The Hindu It has sharply lifted tax buoyancy and ushered many new return filers into the income tax net The argument about whether demonetisation was good or bad for the economy refuses to die down even a year after the event. Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan took potshots at it in a recent speech. While one can endlessly debate, with very little data, on whether the ban on high-value currency notes dealt a...

-NDTV NDTV scanned nearly 1,300 articles and cross-referenced this with databases. We went through 1,000 recent tweets of politicians and public figures. New Delhi: The use of hateful and divisive language by high-ranking politicians has increased almost 500% in the past four years, an NDTV data collection exercise has found. The premise of the exercise was simple: it seems not a day, or a week goes by without some senior politician -...

-The Hindu Business Line Hyderabad University linguist discovers Walmiki and Malhar, spoken by small communities in Odisha. Hyderabad: A linguist from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has stumbled on two languages called Walmiki and Malhar both predominantly in the remote region’s of Odisha. The languages are categorised `endangered’ as the number of people speaking is small. For instance Malhar is spoken by just 75 including children from a particular community. These people live...