-The Tribune Agrarian society vs a non-agrarian economy poses a huge political challenge. JUST how many farmers are there in India? This is not merely a statistical question. This is a question of policy and political significance. We have all grown up reading about India as an agrarian economy, with a majority of its population engaged in farming. Does that continue to be the case? Or has the number of farmers declined...

  The outcome of a social audit (conducted in April this year) related to the pilot cash transfer programme in the public distribution system (PDS) in Nagri block (Ranchi district) has confirmed that most beneficiaries want back the normal ration system that existed previously. Yet the Jharkhand state government continues with the DBT-based PDS in Nagri block, instead of returning back to the older system, says a press release by the...

-Business Standard Between FY16 and FY17, the number of farmers enrolled in the scheme declined from about 57.3 million to about 48.5 million, a fall of around 15% Kolkata: The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the flagship crop insurance scheme of the Narendra Modi government, has entered its third year of operation, albeit with a substantial decline in farmers' enrolment in its second year, the data reveals. Between FY16 and FY17, the...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-The Hindu It has sharply lifted tax buoyancy and ushered many new return filers into the income tax net The argument about whether demonetisation was good or bad for the economy refuses to die down even a year after the event. Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan took potshots at it in a recent speech. While one can endlessly debate, with very little data, on whether the ban on high-value currency notes dealt a...