-The Economic Times blog Finance minister Arun Jaitley was correct when he stated in April that constitutional constraints do not empower his government to tax agricultural income, implying that he is not constrained from amending the Income-Tax Act. B R Ambedkar, in framing the Constitution, was vehemently critical of British land revenue system, the foundation for which was laid during the Mughal period, and strengthened by the East India Company, which...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Over two decades after midday meals were introduced in city schools, one out of every three children studying in a municipal school is malnourished, an RTI reply has revealed. The data showed that undernourishment of students in these schools is accelerating with the incidence showing a four-fold jump over the last three years. In the same period, the utilization of midday meal budget fell from 81% to...

-HuffingtonPost.in The available numbers could be telling only part of the truth. An RTI query has revealed that for the first time in this decade, the number of abortions in Mumbai has fallen. But are abortions on the decline in the country as a whole? "Going by the data that we have from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), the trend has show an increase in abortions," says Poonam Muttreja, Executive...

-The Indian Express As the Modi government completes three years, here are three potentially game-changing steps it could now take to harness the sector’s unrealised potential Amidst the predictable tidal wave of opinion pieces to mark the Narendra Modi government’s third anniversary, one little event last week squeezed its way into the inside pages of a few newspapers. This was a call for a “farm strike” in Maharashtra from June 1,...

-The Times of India Right on the edge of the Ganga basin that spans 11 Indian states lies Naujhil block, a few kilometres west of the Yamuna in UP's Mathura district. You would think this is a blessed location with plentiful water all round. With its 17 tributaries, including the Yamuna, Ganga's catchment area has about 525 billion cubic metres (bcm) of surface water and about 171 bcm of groundwater. On average,...