-Livemint.com India’s richest districts are situated along the western coastline while the poorest are clustered in the easternmost parts of the country, shows analysis Mumbai: Where do the affluent in India live? That’s the million dollar question consumer goods firms, marketers, and analysts often struggle to answer because of patchy and unreliable data. For the first time in India, an official data source provides detailed data on household assets and consumer durables that...

-The Indian Express The study ‘Agrarian distress: Why Vidarbha and Marathwada alone’, which aims to identify the causes behind the farm crisis in these regions, says top priority should be given to watershed strategies while planning mitigation measures. Pune: Subsidies and debt waivers cannot resolve the agrarian crisis, according to a study by the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE). The study ‘Agrarian distress: Why Vidarbha and Marathwada alone’, which aims...

-The Hindu Business Line Tested across AP, this technique, though devoid of chemicals, has helped boost productivity and cut production costs In the last fortnight, two announcements to revive the sagging farm sector evoked differing responses. While the announcement by the government to hike minimum support price for selected crops generated political noise, a more nuanced approach by NITI Aayog seeking State governments’ support in reducing cost of crop production was...

-Livemint.com The actual determination of MSP is driven by a ‘business as usual’ practice of incremental increases in line with past trend, combined with the political need for ‘look good’ optics The recent increase in the minimum support prices (MSP) for major kharif crops has reignited the debate about food price policy. Some analysts believe that the increase has been excessive, that it will push up inflation, both directly and also indirectly...

-Livemint.com The home likes the income, but is unwilling to let the woman give up on household work, child care and eldercare duties A long time ago when I was in my first job as a trainee researcher in a magazine, I would take the chartered bus (a working people’s school bus that collects people from a residential area and drops them in an office hub) from home to office. The art...