-India Water Portal Budget fails to allocate enough to turn the rhetoric of tap water to each household into reality. Union Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman presented the decade's first union budget in the parliament on 1st February 2020. While presenting budget for 2020-2021, she started with the country’s vision for the decade in which she emphasised on water management and clean rivers as one of the 10 points of vision for...

-The Indian Express The FM’s other ideas for agriculture, especially on Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), which she repeated this year, need to be tested before it becomes a national policy. In her Budget speech, Nirmala Sitharaman spelled out sixteen measures to reboot agriculture and re-affirmed the Modi government’s resolve to double farmers’ incomes by 2022. Agriculture is categorized by her as “Aspirational India”. All these sixteen measures are broadly in the...

-The Hindu ‘Barefoot College’s archives bear testimony to Ms. Lindsay’s methodical and painstaking work’ Manya Jayaram Lindsay, younger sister of social activist Aruna Roy, died in Hitchin, U.K., after suffering from cancer in recent years. She had set up the preventive and curative health structure at the Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC), Tilonia — widely known as the Barefoot College — and studied indigenous people in the U.S. and Australia, and...

-The Hindu The FM deserves credit for keeping the capital expenditure steady amid receipts shortfall; but her plan does not meet market expectations of sweeping reforms The Finance Minister’s job is a greatly coveted one but no politician would want to be in Nirmala Sitharaman’s shoes today. The Indian economy has slowed to a 5% crawl. The financial system is under considerable stress. Assumptions about tax revenues have gone awry. The clamour...

-The Hindu For the first time, the Muslim community is asserting its religious identity as well as its Indian identity, says the IAS officer who quit office to protest the J&K lockdown Kannan Gopinathan, the former IAS officer, first caught the nation’s eye when he stepped down from the service to protest the lockdown in Jammu and Kashmir. He resigned as secretary, power department of the Union Territories of Daman and Diu,...