-Business Standard On life expectancy at birth, India fares marginally better than Pakistan New Delhi: Reacting to the terrorist strike at the army camp in Uri, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Pakistan to go to war against poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and infant mortality instead, saying let’s see who wins those wars. But a Business Standard examination of various human development indicators suggests that while currently India fares better on most key indicators,...

-The Times of India VIJAYAWADA: The farm credit disbursal system in the state remains crippled for a long time now as a majority of tenant farmers, who constitute about 80 per cent of the cultivators in the state, are unable to avail of the loan facility. Experts say the latest recommendations by the Bankers' sub-committees also do not reflect the reality. In fact, they fear the recommendations will only aggravate the...

-The Indian Express Beed District Collector Naval Kishore Ram said the district had received around 45 per cent of its average rainfall in the past four years. Beed: Celebrations are on in Marathwada. It’s been raining for nearly 10 days now, and the region till recently in the news for a water train is marking the end of four years of drought with sweets, drums and photos next to overflowing dams. While...

-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...

-The Hindu Governance performance ranked over a decade Regional disparity has been growing over the years, shows a new study which evaluates the governance performance of 19 major States. The research, conducted by Sudipto Mundle, Samik Chaudhury and Satadru Sikdar, was published in The Economic and Political Weekly earlier this month. Five of the six best-performing States in 2001 — Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Punjab — continue to be the...