Although corruption touches every section of the Indian society, there are very few complaints made against bribery or corrupt people. How can one explain this contradiction? Is it the case that the laws relating to corruption are so weak and toothless in our country that people seldom rely on them to get justice? Recent research based on data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) confirms the above-mentioned fact. Please click...

-Livemint.com Economist Esther Duflo on demonetisation impact, role of randomized control trials in policymaking, low priority assigned to health and education in India New Delhi: India’s demonetisation of high-value currency notes is a dramatic example of a policy announcement made without any serious thought given to implementation, said Esther Duflo, one of the leading development economists of the world and a professor at the department of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of...

-The Economic Times One month after demonetisation, the Supreme Court is hearing several public interest petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the “demonetisation notification”, which declared that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would no longer be legal tender post midnight on November 8, 2016. The preamble to the notification stated that its objective was to eliminate fake currency used for financing terrorism and to address the problem of “unaccounted money” in...

-The Economic Times KOLKATA: The West Bengal government has decided to pay its rice farmers by directly transferring the amount to their bank accounts. The government, which is initiating such a move for the first time, hopes to start the process in all 330 blocks of the state from December 10. The state has earmarked Rs 8,000 crore to purchase 52 lakh metric tonnes of rice this year. “We will pay farmers...

-The Telegraph Ahmedabad: Samir Shah never had such spare time in his life as an oil mill owner. This is, after all, the peak season when mills buy oil seeds that are available after the harvesting of kharif crops. But the Saurashtra businessman has been sitting idle the past fortnight. There's no cash to do business. The demonetisation drive has left entrepreneurs like him with a shrunken wallet. And farmers don't usually accept...