-Centre for Financial Accountability blog The institution of Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in India is patterned on the British model. In Britain, The Exchequer & Audit Department Act of 1866 created the office of CAG with a view to strengthen democracy and exercise parliamentary control over national finances. The office of CAG came into being, thanks to the missionary zeal of William Gladstone who was Finance Minister at the time...

-Hindustan Times In the discourse on agriculture, for instance, farmer suicides are cited as the biggest proof of the agrarian crisis in the country by a large section. India’s political economy discourse is often a prisoner of the dictum that when there is no theory, there is a conspiracy theory. Corruption, rather than an accentuated cyclical shock after the global financial crisis, combined with the poor governance structures in Indian...

-Livemint.com Reeling under intense dry spell, state recorded 49% rain?deficit, says regional?disaster monitoring centre Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday declared 156 out of the 176 talukas of the state drought hit in the wake of a failed northeast monsoon. This has added to the growing call for the speedy implementation of the farm loan waiver to mitigate the deepening agrarian distress. The declaration comes months after several districts of the state...

-Livemint.com Thanks to the debt relief commission, 11,354 Kerala farmers have benefited from a disbursement of over ?11 crore, and there are no farmer suicides in the state Ernakulam/ Bengaluru: Back in 2006, Kerala came face to face with an explosive situation. Ironically in a state dominated by Communist politicians, farming was dominated by export-oriented cash crops such as rubber and pepper, prices of which had plunged in the global market. It...

-The Indian Express Insecurity, more than poverty or indebtedness, is the key economic issue that politicians must address If social inequality is the most acutely felt social problem in India, insecurity, more than poverty, is the most acutely felt economic problem. While most measures suggest that only around one-fifth of the population today is under the official poverty line, large sections of those even much above that line are subject to...