-The Hindu Business Line The NITI Aayog should revive district-level planning in order to implement the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution While the Planning Commission, which was virtually an executive arm of the Union government, stands abolished, the District Planning Committee (DPC), a constitutional institution mandated “to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole” with a focus on resource endowments, environmental conservation, infrastructural development and spatial...

-The Hindu Supreme Court's observations on Bihar, Gujarat and Haryana its judgment on the PIL filed by Swaraj Abhiyan on drought The Supreme Court said on Wednesday that Bihar, Gujarat and Haryana were hesitant to even acknowledge, let alone address, a drought or a drought-like situation. They had not disclosed the full facts about the conditions prevailing in their States. It was hearing a PIL filed by Swaraj Abhiyan seeking relief for drought-hit...

-Livemint.com Intergenerational educational mobility continues to be low in India All of us love stories of the son or daughter of an uneducated daily wage labourer or farmer cracking civil service or Indian Institute of Technology entrance exams. The real question, however, is whether such success stories, constituting inter-generational upward mobility in education, are becoming more common or do they constitute pleasant aberrations? Recent economic research suggests that the latter situation...

-The Hindu It is only due to the high rates of growth in the services sector that India’s overall economic growth appears robust. The world economy is so hard to predict. In 2008, as the global financial markets plunged into a crisis, high oil prices were considered to be one of the factors that caused it. Today, many fear that the world economy is on the edge of another recession. Guess what...

-Business Standard We should work in unison to boost growth: FM Even as the Centre harped on devolving higher share of funds to states following the recommendations of the 14th finance commission, the latter demanded that they be given more money and the Union government should retain its share of funding for centrally-sponsored schemes in the upcoming Budget. At the pre-Budget meeting with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday, states also sought more...