-TheWire.in Figures highlighted in an RTI reply cut to the heart of a debate over the government’s assertion to count Mudra loan beneficiaries as employed. New Delhi: Struggling to deliver on the poll promise to create one crore jobs a year, the Narendra Modi government and the BJP may have found a face-saver in the flagship self-employment Mudra scheme, launched under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) in 2015. However, three years in,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Prakash Javadekar's human resource development ministry has failed to back up with details his four-month-old claim that Aadhaar-linkage had helped the government identify 80,000 "ghost lecturers'' at colleges and universities. Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan had moved separate Right to Information applications on the subject. Bhardwaj had sought the state-wise break-up of the "ghost lecturers", their names and those of the colleges and universities...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...

  One of the salient features of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) is that there are provisions in it to ensure transparency and accountability. Section 17(2) of the MGNREGA says that the gram sabha shall conduct regular social audits of all the projects under the scheme taken up within the gram panchayat (GP). In addition to that, Section 17(3) of the MGNREGA states that the GP shall make...

-The Hindu A report on the status of policing in India says that Sikhs, mainly in Punjab reported the highest levels of fear of the police among religious communities. Highlighting the politicisation of police, former Uttar Pradesh DGP Prakash Singh said during the Ayodhya agitation, he was removed as the police chief for a brief period and “the police was pulverised” as political masters didn’t want them to raise their little finger. The...