-Deccan Herald For the first time in 18 years, the country has witnessed a record withdrawal of foreign investors from the Indian equity and debt markets. Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) and Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) have pulled out a record Rs 51,591 crore from the Indian markets in less than nine months of this year amid concerns over a slide in rupee value against the dollar. Earlier in 2008, the FIIs had...

-The Telegraph Given increasing government influence on primary education, we must ask who controls the substance of what children are taught. Education is an important human capability that is considered essential for economic development. Education helps one to know about the world one lives in, think, discover new facts, and create new objects of use. It also helps one in making informed decisions and choices. Education is useful to an individual in...

-Livemint.com Merely putting the labour component of other projects in MGNREGA may not lead to any value addition There are several studies and reports that clearly show that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has accomplished its objectives to a large extent. Initially, this government derided the programme as some kind of a dole—but it later acknowledged its role in rural development, if reluctantly. The chief ministers’ council in...

-Livemint.com The problem escalated due to the government’s focus on infrastructure during 2002-09, especially with the efforts made to promote public-private partnerships The past two years or so have seen rapidly increasing stress in the Indian banking sector, with non-performing assets (NPAs) steadily climbing from under 3% to over 13% of total assets. Loan-loss provisioning for NPAs has seriously eroded the capital base of several banks, limiting their ability to make further...

-The Hindu Business Line The MCA database, which underpins the jump in factory GDP, is unconvincing. The ASI method was set aside for wrong reasons In early 2015, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) introduced a new series of National Accounts Statistics (NAS) with 2011-12 as the base year, replacing the earlier series with the base year 2004-05. It is the CSO's routine job to make such revisions, roughly once in a decade,...