-The Times of India   NAGPUR: Several new components like stress on irrigation in dry-land areas, price stabilization fund, bringing landless farmers in pale of institutional finance through NABARD for working on leased lands, allowing MGNREGA in farm work have won bouquets for finance minister Arun Jaitley from farm activists. "Move to set up a national market for farm produce, micro irrigation and watershed schemes in drought-prone regions, crop loan facilities to landless...

-The Hindu Business Line Drop the euphoria for a moment - a third of India is seriously poor. And urban poverty has risen sharply The latest report on the number of poor Indians shows a third of the population living below the recalibrated poverty lines. C Rangarajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and former chairman of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, was asked to look into the matter...

-The Hindu Business Line   Perpetual growth is a piece of nonsense. The focus should be on protecting livelihoods through sustainable means Construct a building, demolish it, reconstruct, break it down again, and go on repeating this meaningless exercise. You will have economic growth, as currently measured. But no net gain in employment during the endless cycle of construction and demolition, no net increase in productive capacity, and no appreciable change in poverty...

-The Business Standard   Why Indian unemployment figures puzzle many Census data released on Tuesday contained a shocking piece of information: that 47 million young Indians, under the age of 24, were jobless, and looking for work. That's 20 per cent of the youth population. This is hard data confirming a fact that has long been anecdotal: that India has a jobs crisis. The picture that emerges from the Census data is intriguing:...

-The Telegraph The increase in enrolment in primary education in South Asian countries between 2001 and 2010 has not been matched by an increase in learning outcome of children, threatening economic growth in the region, a World Bank report has said. The report titled Student Learning in South Asia has analysed several studies in areas of learning outcome and the link between poor quality primary education and its impact on economic growth. The...