-The Indian Express Demonetisation shows India’s social welfare MEAsures like MGNREGS to be worryingly patchy Following the announcement of demonetisation, reports of its devastating impact on informal sector workers, farmers and migrants began to pour in from across the country. Seeking evidence on two questions — do social security MEAsures work in the face of such an economic shock, and do these programmes themselves face disruption because of demonetisation — we conducted...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has made it very risky for any organisation to publish a survey on alleged corruption in lower judiciary. The court said on Tuesday that the law permitted one or many trial courts to make a reference to a high court to launch contempt proceedings against those responsible for the embarrassing findings. This ruling came in an 11-year-old case filed by Transparency International India...

-The Telegraph After the third general elections held in 1962, the scholar-statesman, C. Rajagopalachari, wrote a fascinating, if now forgotten, essay on the imperfections of our young democracy. "The Indian electorate", remarked Rajaji, "suffers from well-known defects from which Western democracies are relatively free. The Indian voters are in great MEAsure poor and vulnerable to bribery: even a day's expense for food serves to buy a large number of the poor...

-PTI New Delhi: Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian today took the line that the minimum support price on foodgrains for farmers should not continue forever and there should be an "expiry date". "Minimum support price (MSP) originally came into being because we had a big problem of lack of self-sufficiency in foodgrain production. It (MSP) was used as MEAns of providing incentives to farmers. It has been successful. We no longer...

-Livemint.com Repeated price shocks take the sheen off horticulture crops grown by small and marginal farmers New Delhi: In the past few years, horticulture crops emerged as a favourite for small growers across the country. 2016-17 marks the fifth straight year when production of fruits and vegetables is estimated to surpass that of foodgrains. This signals a fundamental shift in India’s farm economy towards a growing share of horticulture crops, which now...