-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The highlight of the gross domestic product (GDP) data for July-September quarter is the overall growth rate of 6.3 per cent, the first time pace of economic growth has increased in six quarters. It suggests that the marked slide we witnessed over the last year has finally stopped. However, a look at the disaggregated data shows that the economy is still struggling. A comparison of the...

-The Financial Express How can the cotton and soybean farmers of Vidarbha and Marathwada supplement their incomes so they can get out of the trap of debt and self-engineered death? That was the theme of Union minister Nitin Gadkari’s ninth edition, four-day agricultural exhibition at Nagpur, called Agrovision, to which I was invited.  A promising beginning has been made. In October last year, the National Dairy Development Board commenced operations. It...

-The Indian Express Union government must address structural issues in agricultural policy, allow states greater autonomy. Farmers from across the country are out on Delhi’s streets agitating just as the deliberations for the 2018 budget are beginning and it’s time to seek solutions to the structural issues that plague the system. The “one-size-fits-all” policy created for the farm sector is self-destructive in design and programmes meant to double farmer incomes are collapsing. The...

-The Times of India BONN (Germany): India is the sixth most vulnerable country in the world in terms of facing extreme weather events with Haiti, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Sri Lanka and Vietnam taking top five positions in the fresh list of nations facing climate risk. The ranking was released here by the Germanwatch, an independent Berlin-based development and environmental organisation, on Thursday in its latest global climate risk index (CRI). The Index put...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Bombarding the Supreme Court with statistics to convince it about ease of doing day-to-day activities with Aadhaar, the Centre said 118.64 crore Indians, which is 88% of the population, had obtained Aadhaar and they used it 1,216.8 crore times for authentication purposes. "As of today, the total number of Aadhaar-based authentication is 12,168,022,172. Therefore, the Indian population has used Aadhaar-based authentication over 1,216 crore times to...