-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tens of thousands of would-be schoolteachers have been left in the lurch with the Central Teacher Eligibility Test, usually held twice a year, not being conducted at all this year because of a pending guidelines revision. Although the states too hold their own Teacher Eligibility Tests, it's the central test alone that facilitates the selection of elementary teachers at central schools such as the Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas...

-Livemint.com World Bank has reduced its India GDP growth forecast to 7% for 2017-18 from 7.2%, blaming disruptions caused by demonetisation and GST New Delhi: After remaining the world’s fastest-growing region for eight consecutive quarters, South Asia has slipped to the third position behind East Asia and the Pacific regions, as India’s economy slowed to its lowest level in 13 quarters, the World Bank said on Monday. This is at a time when...

-The Times of India Many members of the Niti Aayog's newly constituted Working Group on Nutrition have significant conflicts of interests. Several are representatives of international agencies, which have close ties to multinational food companies including Nestle, Hindustan Unilever, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Mars and Ajinomoto, and which have been pushing packaged therapeutic food to address malnutrition. The government has repeatedly clarified that packaged energy dense food is against India's policy on...

-TheWire.in The World Bank’s estimate that Aadhaar has the potential to save $11 billion in subsidies every year has repeatedly been used by the Centre to justify the programme. But does this figure hold up under close scrutiny? Evidence-based policy-making usually proceeds by outlining the problem at hand, discussing various solutions, conducting studies to understand the effectiveness of these solutions and then prescribing a course of action based on accumulated evidence. It’s safe...

-The Hindu Over the years we have lost over a lakh varieties of native rice. One district in Odisha is rediscovering some of them It is a balmy winter morning when I meet Kamli Bataraa, an ebullient Adivasi farmer, at her home in Belugan, in southern Odisha’s Koraput district. There is a hum across the village from the threshing of just-harvested paddy. When I ask Kamli about the rice varieties she grows,...