-FirstPost.com Preparation of budgets is traditionally an incremental process: the first railway budget of the present government took off from the landscape sketched in the 12th Five Year Plan. Expansion, modernisation and development of railway infrastructure were to be given thrust through 3Ps: Public-Private Partnerships. Budget 2016-17, however, promises a new horizon on two fronts: overcoming challenges through 3Rs: Reorganising, Restructuring and Rejuvenating Indian railways, and introducing pillars of strategy, including zero-based...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Ahead of state polls in five states, the Modi government has constituted a committee of senior officers drawn from intelligence agencies and state police to keep a close watch on the movement of essential commodities in the domestic and international markets. On Tuesday, Cabinet secretary P K Sinha took a review meeting on prices of such commodities and directed all these agencies to enforce stock limits...

-Business Standard The move comes after a joint action panel recommended use of traditional varieties as they were immune to pest attacks Chandigarh: Farmer suicides in Punjab and Haryana in the aftermath of extensive damage to the cotton crop in 2015-16 due to pest attack has led to a swing in official opinion against genetically modified (Bt) seeds. A Joint Action Committee was appointed by the two state governments on the causes and...

-Frontline Former psephologist Yogendra Yadav, now a member of the political collective Swaraj Abhiyan, recently toured India’s drought-affected districts. He called it a Samvedna Yatra. During the tour, he took note of the agony in rural areas affected by what he calls “one of the worst droughts in independent India” The drought, according to him, has left farmers and the larger rural community in extreme distress, leading to damaging changes in...

-Observer Research Foundation It is not often discussed in India that there was a time, not too far into the past, when the doctors from the famous All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) performed and promoted sex-selective abortions as an effective and ethical method to address India’s population problem. Some of them even suggested that “the couple keeps on reproducing just to have a son”, and prenatal determination of sex...