-Livemint.com With barely a few months to go for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the question across political party lines is: what can really be done now, and quickly? New Delhi: When residents gather around the fire on foggy winter evenings in Rampura, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district, the conversation often veers toward the declining fortunes in agriculture. Take 27-year-old Pushpendra Singh, who completed his master’s degree in commerce in 2016,...

-India Today The Nitish Kumar government has ordered an inquiry into the INCident after the report surfaced. * Students were made to sit in different classrooms based on their caste and religion * The Bihar govt has ordered action against the prINCipal of the school * The District Education Officer has asked for stern action against the prINCipal A government-run school in Bihar's Vaishali district has come under scrutiny after students there complained that they...

-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has INCreased after the Modi...

-Livemint.com Declining INCome, shrinking farmlands, rise in number of dependents on existing holdings add to farm woes Bengaluru: SINCe 2000, Karnataka has put nearly 200,000 hectares of farmland to non-agricultural use, INCluding for industrial, residential and infrastructure projects. Besides shrinking farmlands, the number of dependents on existing land holdings have also INCreased considering little employment opportunities elsewhere. From 1.312 million hectares in 2000-01 (cumulative), the total land put to non-agricultural use has risen...

-Down to Earth The scheme's Management Information System destroys local accountability, promotes centralisation and administrative control and gives out wrong data There is an INCreasing tendency in the Union government to show performances of central schemes, especially social welfare programmes, through data captured by the Management Information System (MIS). It is indeed a matter of astonishment how the MIS data always shows high performances of schemes and programmes, while ground surveys and...