-Business Standard Back-to-back droughts and record-low farm commodity prices have forced the NDA government to look at MGNREGS in a new light.Things have started to look up for the scheme About a year back, Raqibul Hussain, Assam's rural development minister, was unhappy because he could not stop the Central government from lowering the state's annual entitlement under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for 2014-15. This, he said in a day-long...

-Business Standard Conventional subsidy bill of Rs 2.44 lakh crore, or 1.7 per cent of GDP, in 2015-16 If lower tax rate is equivalent to subsidising, the National Democratic Alliance government is clearly targeting the 'well-off' segment of the population. Unlike the previous years, the Economic Survey 2015-16 has dealt with the issue of subsidy by giving only a box on petroleum subsidies, while devoting a chapter with nine-and-a-half pages to 'Bounties...

-The Hindu The lack of any established principles or credible data prompts demands for reservation such as those of the Patels and Jats.The solution lies in shuffling reserved categories. It is only when Jats, Gujjars or Muslims demand reservation, and particularly when these demands become aggressive, that our political system suddenly wakes up and takes notice. However, this notice is simply confined to ascertaining whether the specific group demanding reservation is worthy...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...

-Livemint.com It has repeatedly failed to protect the domestic food security agenda The cabinet’s approval of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) on Wednesday is, on the face of it, a relatively innocuous development. As WTO deals go, this is low-hanging fruit. The agreement is to reduce administrative barriers at ports and customs, reducing transactional costs of international trade and consequently—according to various studies—increasing global gross domestic product...