-Firstpost.com “What you think is very clear, is not very clear,” told union finance minister Arun Jaitley to a reporter at a Delhi presser on Thursday called to take stock of Modi government’s 3-year performance. The reporter was asking about the impact of demonetisation on the GDP citing the sharp decline (6.1 percent) in the Jan-Mar quarter. Jaitley played down the impact of demonetisation saying it wasn’t the primary reason for...

-The Indian Express Agriculture GDP bucks the trend of decline in other sectors. But can the government help the farmers sustain this growth? The first advanced estimates of GDP growth for the financial year 2016-2017 (FY17) show a marginal decline from 7.6 per cent last year to 7.1 per cent this year. Of the various sectors, gross value added at basic prices (2011-12), mining and quarrying is down from 7.4 per cent...

-The Hindu Following several compaints, the govt. has asked Hotels/restaurants to prominently display that the service charge in the bill is voluntary. You, as a consumer, have the discretion to not pay ‘service charges’ added to your bill by any hotel/restaurant, according to the government. In a statement issued on Monday, the consumer affairs department asked the state governments to advise the Hotels/restaurants to prominently display that “the service charges are discretionary /...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Kitchen waste and heap of vegetables dumped at wholesale markets will no longer be the food for stray animals in the city. The wastes will now be processed and converted into organic fertilizer under Swachh Bharat Mission. Taking a cue from Hyderabad, Ranchi civic body has installed low-cost fertilizer manufacturing units at Khadgara vegetable market on Tuesday to convert the wastes into organic fertilizer. The initiative was started as trial...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement demonetising high denomination notes on November 8, 2016, will do little to address the prime objective of flushing out black money but will adversely affect the economy in the short term, especially the informal sector, which is predominant in India, says M. Govinda Rao, a Member of the Fourteenth Finance Commission and Emeritus Professor, National Institute of Public...