-TheWire.in Indian agriculture is in the grip of a crisis and needs to move away from the 'cereal trap' towards alternatives. Deregulation of marketing should come second, not first. At the Indian Express’s e-Adda on March 21, Punjab’s chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh asked a question that has still not received an answer: Why did the Central government feel it had to change a marketing system that has existed for a hundred...

-Scroll.in Going against conventional wisdom, the Indian middle class is not a source of liberalism. A profound contradiction lies at the heart of contemporary India’s political economy. On the one hand, it embraces economic liberalism. In September 2020, it legislated laws aimed at liberalising agriculture from state-guaranteed protections. The recent budget, passed in February, was high on promises of accelerating divestment of public sector undertakings. On the other hand, however, this enthusiasm...

-The Hindu Subjective well-being and income are intricately linked The question whether the rich are more satisfied with their lives is often taken for granted, even though surveys, like the Gallup World Poll, show that the relationship between subjective well-being and income is often weak, except in low-income countries in Africa and South Asia. Researcher Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators, for example, report that the correlation between household income and reported life...

-Livemint.com Much of the increased spending will go towards preventive aspects of healthcare, with the health ministry by itself not gaining much even after the pandemic. India needs to do a whole lot more to strengthen its health infrastructure In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a 137% increase in allocations on “health and well-being" for 2021-22, to ₹2.24 trillion. Embedded in that declaration was a definitional change: it also...

-Newslaundry.com Journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta faces arrest for an article on the Adani Group, comedian Munawar Faruqui languishes in jail. The good news we were all waiting for in these bleak times came with India’s sensational win in the cricket test series against Australia in Brisbane on January 19. But even as we celebrated good times for Indian cricket, the bad times for Indian journalism and freedom of speech and expression continued. On...