-TheWire.in The Modi government’s attempts to reshape the economy lie entirely in the financial realm; they come on the back of concerted efforts to strip workers of legal protection in not just the informal sector, but also the formal. The Narendra Modi government has made two major interventions in the economic sphere, demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), with the ostensible aim of expanding the formal sector at the expense...

-The Indian Express Former Union Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday argued against the move to make Aadhaar mandatory, saying the data collected for it was prone to misuse in the world of information technology. “In the era of information technology, the question of possibility of misuse is not just a possibility. It will be misused,” the senior advocate told a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India...

-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transplantation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Flagging poor returns to farmers due to low minimum support price (MSP) and inadequate market interventions, farm activists on Tuesday demanded setting up a permanent statutory commission on farmers' income and asked the government to take measures to ensure remunerative prices to cultivators and make the farming climate resilient. Pointing at the economic survey which found only a slight increase in real agriculture income in the...

-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farmers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farmer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...