-The Tribune In India, mounting demographic pressures are Leading to soil degradation. About 17 per cent of the global human and 11 per cent of livestock population is being sustained on a mere 2 per cent of the world's land and 4 per cent of its freshwater resources. The year 2015 has been designated as the International Year of the Soils by the United Nations. Recently, December 5 was commemorated as World...

-Business Standard While the revised estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) suggest the Indian economy turned the corner in 2013-14, concerns remain over the durability of this nascent recovery. Particularly worrying is the recent slowdown in rural wage growth, which signals a weakening of rural demand. Growth in rural wages, which had averaged 18 per cent in the previous few years, fell to less than five per cent in September...

-Governance Now Shanta Kumar committee recommendation to curtail PDS based on "motivated data fudging" A group of economists have challenged the government move to scale down the ambit of the food security initiative, arguing that leakages in the public distribution system (PDS) are not as bad as an official committee has concluded. A ‘high-level committee on restructuring of FCI', headed by Shanta Kumar, submitted its report to prime minister Narendra Modi last month,...

-HuffingtonPost.in   Corruption in the Public Distribution System has been cited by the Indian government as the main reason to go for cash transfers to low-income and below-poverty-line families that qualify for receiving them. Such corruption includes siphoning off grains meant for the poor by middlemen and then selling them in the open market to make profit, or higher income families receiving subsidized food through collusion with officials. Both Lead to leakages and...

The Hindu In the urgency to grant industry its due with promises of ‘Make in India,' the marginalised cannot continue to be victims of grave policy neglect and continuing alienation For some years now, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF)has been perceived as a roadblock to development or a facilitator for the industry depending on which side you are on. Former Union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan's recent letter to Sonia Gandhi...