-The Hindu Business Line ‘GDP growth rates for 2004-11 were bound to come down’ New Delhi: “You can slice and dice the data anyway you want, but India’s GDP growth rates between 2004 and 2011 were bound to come down in the backcasting computation effort,” said TCA Anant, former Chief Statistician of India. When the new base year of 2011-12 came out, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) had documented and recognised that the...

-The Hindu Braving Maoist call for boycott, villagers exercise franchise Karimnagar (Tenlangana): In spite of heightened naxalite threat, villagers, mostly dominated by tribal communities, have set an example in Telangana by recording over 90% polling in the Maoist stronghold villages in the interior Mahadevpur, Kataram and Mahamutharam mandals adjoining the Chhattisgarh in the erstwhile Karimnagar district, now in Jayashankar-Bhupalapalli district. Braving the Maoist call for poll boycott, people formed serpentine queues to exercise...

-The Hindu The Electoral Bond Scheme inhibits the citizen’s capacity to meaningfully participate in political and public life Early this year the government introduced an Electoral Bond Scheme purportedly with a view to cleansing the prevailing culture of political sponsorship. But the programme’s failings have been so blindingly obvious, and its consequences so utterly devastating to rectitude and transparency in government, that even O.P. Rawat, who just retired Chief Election Commissioner, thought...

-The Hindu Citizenship form will have a separate column for them The contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, is pending in Parliament, but the Union Home Ministry has notified amendments to the Citizenship Rules, 2009, to include a separate column in the citizenship form for applicants belonging to six minority communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Under the amendments, a separate entry in the form will ask the applicant: “Do you belong to one...

-The Hindu With farm distress becoming a major electoral issue in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Vikas Pathak visits two pockets of rural India, Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh and Jodhpur district in Rajasthan, and finds that the political instincts of the rural voter are not necessarily rooted in agriculture. A few farmers sit huddled near a statue of Sardar Patel at Balaguda village in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh pouring out...