-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-Hindustan Times The court was hearing a public interest litigation by one Anoop Paranwal through lawyer Prashant Bhushan asking for a fair and transparent procedure for EC appointments. The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Centre to come up with a law or a procedure for the appointment of members of the poll panel or it would be forced to step in, setting up another possible showdown with the government. The Centre opposed...

-The Hindu The long-term benefits of GST are clear — the challenge is to quickly address the short-term obstacles The Goods and Services Tax (GST) is in force from today. The reform, touted as a “game changer” and the “reform of the century”, was deemed worthy of a launch on the midnight of June 30 in the Central Hall of the Parliament. Indeed, one is reminded of the famous speech by Pandit...

-The Hindu Sans quality jobs, ‘aspirational young India’ will become ‘angry young India’ The government – and Paytm – may not agree, but there are some downsides to the rising digitisation and connectivity. One is an unleashing of aspirations. Everyone wants not just what Bengal’s leftists used to contemptuously dismiss as components of the middle-class Indian dream — gaadi, baadi, chaakri (car, home, job) — but a whole lot of other things....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a major victory for the Narendra Modi government that is set on making Aadhaar compulsory for several kinds of transactions, the Supreme Court upheld on Friday the law making the UID number a must for filing income tax returns and its linkage to PAN card. In what could cheer up the government, which faced anxious times while defending validity of Section 139AA of the Income...