-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic food security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...

-The Hindu Business Line The scheme has made life easier for the people of this Andhra Pradesh village, one of the first in the state to have 100 per cent financial inclusion. But the local experience also throws up a few questions relevant nationally, reports Gunturi Naga Sridhar Fourty-year-old M Ravamma, from Polavaram, a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, had a nightmarish experience two months ago. Her husband complained...

-IndiaClimateDialogue.net While over 20% of India’s population has no access to electricity, the richest 40% of the population gets highly subsidised power; the second of a three-part series on the subsidy skew Along with coal mining, electricity is regulated by the state in India and subsidised. Electricity tariffs are kept deliberately low for poor households. Unfortunately much of this electricity is allocated in such a way that business and industrial consumers as...

-Economic and Political Weekly Biswajit Dhar (bisjit@gmail.com) teaches at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Roshan Kishore (roshan.jnu@gmail.com) is currently a data journalist with Mint. With the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the United States farm subsidies had moved towards income support, reducing spending on price support measures. The explicit reason was that the WTO had held that the latter forms were more...

-The Indian Express Processes of knowledge diffusion reinforce inequalities. We need explicit pro-poor targeting of efforts There is much enthusiasm today for efforts to improve access to information about poor people’s rights and entitlements. In a much-debated recent example, Facebook’s “Free Basics” platform aimed to provide free access to a selected slice of the internet (including, of course, Facebook). In arguing for Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg said that “everyone… deserves access to...