-The Hindu Compensation for last fiscal paid to States using previous years’ balance of cess The Centre made up a 42% shortfall in Goods and Services Tax compensation cess collection in 2019-20 by using balance of cess from previous years, plus a transfer from the Consolidated Fund of India. Meanwhile, the GST Council, which was slated to meet this month to discuss the possibility of market borrowing to meet likely future shortfalls,...

-Financial Express Over 152 crore person (work) days have been created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) so far during the current fiscal, and this is more than half the ambitious revised target of 300 crore days set for the whole of the year, according to the official dashboard. In the April-July period of last fiscal, the person days created under the scheme were just 116 crore. Please click...

-The Hindu As infections surge in Odisha, many guest workers are relieved to have stayed on Like several other migrant workers from Odisha, Sumant Naik made innumerable calls throughout May to enquire about a train back home from Perundurai in Erode; he also weighed the costs of returning by bus. Despite several calls, the journey back did not materialise. Now two months later, as the pandemic induced lockdown has eased in Tamil Nadu,...

-The Hindu Business Line With farmers selling more produce outside mandis, there is no record of transactions Arrivals in mandis across the country are significantly lower this year. Only five-to-seven bags out of every 10 of grains, pulses and spices, produced by farmers, have come to the market in the last six months. An analysis of the production, procurement and mandi arrival numbers indicates that there is a large quantity of unaccounted floating...

-Newsclick.in It is beyond belief and understanding why the government is refusing to distribute the mountain of food grain stocks sitting in its warehouses. India produced a record cereal harvest of nearly 273 million tonnes in 2019-20, a jump of 10 million tonnes over the preceding year. While rice production increased marginally, both wheat and coarse grains showed notable increases. Besides these, the production of pulses increased by nearly a million tonnes...