-FirstPost.com “But this is paap”, I found myself slipping into a language I don’t normally use. We had stopped at a small village in Mahoba, and were asking people about their accessibility to subsidised food. The local ration shop owner (Kotedar) was present there, as was the food inspector – on orders from the district administration. The two evidently got along very well. Despite their best efforts to tutor everyone before...

-The Indian Express A study in the National Capital Region shows why the search for a house is longer and more arduous for a Muslim tenant. Earlier this month, this newspaper reported that a Muslim IAS aspirant in Pune resorted to a “Hindu” pseudonym to overcome the difficulty of obtaining paying-guest accommodation. Keen followers of the news from India, like us, recognise this as an example of periodic reports from cities...

-Livemint.com Nominal hikes in crop support prices means that farmers are bearing the burden of government policy to keep food inflation in check New Delhi: The Narendra Modi led government has set a target to double farm incomes by 2022, but in the past three years it announced only nominal hikes for support prices of rice and wheat. What’s more: the raises were lower than the prevailing retail inflation, meaning declining...

-The Hindu Figuring out key parameters on which to measure a State’s performance provides a playbook of best practices for others to follow. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (MGNREGA) aims at “enhancing the livelihood security of people in rural areas by guaranteeing 100 days of wage-employment in a financial year to a rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.” In the financial year...

-The Indian Express Punjab’s farmers are losing interest in planting new trees, with prices halving from their peaks. Jalandhar/ Ludhiana: Sandeep Singh Randhawa grew paddy and wheat on his 65-acre land at Talwandi Lal Singh village in Gurdaspur district’s Batala tehsil. That was till the late eighties, when he first planted poplar on the edges of his field. The returns encouraged him to expand the area under these trees — each...