-The Hindustan Times Polpol Path (Jharkhand): Laldeo Asur passes his days basking in the mellow winter sun, his 70-year-old body now too frail for the rigours of village life. But it is not his advancing age he is too concerned about but the advance of modernity on his tribe, the Asurs. Laldeo knows that after him there will be none to practice a traditional technology for iron smelting, a craft perfected by his...

-The Hindu Economic diversification in rural India, involving the emergence and growth of non-agricultural activities, is considered an important means of increasing employment and per capita incomes, and improving standards of living. However, non-agricultural activities themselves are of various kinds differing in terms of productivity and the returns they yield. So while the development of some activities may point to rural dynamism, many others exist and grow because of the distress-driven...

-The Hindu When the National Democratic Alliance government amended the land acquisition Act through an ordinance last week, it promised to set farmers and industry on an amiable path to mutual benefits and development. Land acquisition under the 1894 Act had been marked by violent protests, even police firings at farmers. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013, is the first law on...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Among the various axes of inequality in India, regional disparities have acquired greater salience in recent times, with demands being made for special status for certain states on this basis. What has been completely overlooked in the process is that regional backwardness in India is a moving frontier with the most intense forms of poverty and deprivation getting increasingly concentrated within enclaves of backwardness, especially those inhabited...