-The Telegraph The impact the beast called social media can really have on the ensuing general elections Sometime in the late 2000s, a young software engineer who voluntarily ran social media propaganda for the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party got an opportunity to attend a BJP social media meet in Bangalore. Among the people who saw this young man speak there was the then Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi....
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Managing India's sugar surplus -N Madhavan
-The Hindu Business Line As the sector pays the price for Governments’ populism, it is time for an all new approach Earlier this month, Australia and Brazil dragged India to the WTO for its market-distorting policies on sugar. Their contention was that the subsidies, including the extent of farmer assistance, far exceeded the norms set by the WTO resulting in higher sugar production/exports which dampen the international prices and, consequently, hurt their...
More »Why is South Asia performing so badly on the SDGs? -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
-NetworkIdeas.org The SDGs were obviously incredibly ambitious – far more so than the Millennium Development Goals that they succeeded – and so it was indeed a remarkable achievement that Governments of almost all countries signed up to them. There were no less than 17 very significant and substantive goals, each containing multiple targets, and each target relying often on more than one indicator. And these goals and targets are not simply...
More »Prioritising housing needs of slum-dwellers is not only a moral imperative but now a legal one -Eklavya Vasudev
-The Indian Express Government agencies and courts can no longer give precedence to one kind of public interest (that of middle and upper classes) over another kind of public interest (that of the slum residents). On March 18, the Delhi High Court held that slum dwellers are not secondary citizens but citizens with equal rights. Authorities can evict slum dwellers only when their occupation of the land is illegal. Any unannounced...
More »'Govt is cheating us, destroying traditional agriculture'
-Down to Earth Farmers living in tribal areas in Jharkhand alleged that industrialists and the Government are conspiring to ruin diverse traditional seeds and crops Farmers from Jharkhand’s Singhbhum district, a tribal area, alleged that the Government and industrialists are trying to destroy their traditional knowledge of agriculture and looting cultivable land. This happened on the last day of a conference held on ‘Traditional agriculture: challenges and possibilities’ at Chaibasa this month. These...
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