-PTI NEW DELHI: The world bank usually tames wild economies and helps countries stabilize their fluctuating finances, but in a global first, the banker for the world has gone to a zoo that too in India! This is a new addition in the portfolio of the bank as part of its ever-expanding work on urban regeneration. A zoo is nothing but a bank of captive animals. In a novel initiative, the World...

-Hindustan Times Washington: Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Basics, the free but restrictive internet service that has run into trouble with Indian authorities, has picked up yet another opponent, the world bank. Its World Development Report released Wednesday called Free Basics, which is a part of Facebook’s internet.org initiative, the “antithesis of net neutrality and a distortion of markets”. The bank is not opposing Free Basics specifically, or its Indian rollout. It believes any attempt...

-Livemint.com The takeaway from world bank’s World Development Report is that there is no short cut for developing countries if they want to reap digital dividends New Delhi: Every day, there are 4 billion searches made on Google. That number is also the count of people who do not have access to the internet, according to the World Development Report (WDR) 2016, released by the world bank on Thursday. The report,...

-The Hindu Several instances of in-kind transfers being successfully implemented. Social sector groups want Finance Minister to review the implementation of alternative subsidy systems before going ahead with Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT). “There have been several instances of in-kind transfers being successfully implemented in various parts of the country. Our appeal to the Finance Minister was to look at all the successful examples of alternative schemes before the government pushes ahead with the...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...