-The Hindu Business Line UN panel cites social norms, costs among barriers to digital inclusion of poor women New Delhi: Wide gender gaps in access to the internet as well as mobile phone ownership threaten to “leave women behind” as countries develop, says a report by the UN high-level panel, calling for digital inclusion, especially of poor women, to achieve one of the key Sustainable Development Goals — economic empowerment of women...

-The Indian Express Government policies could not be framed solely on the findings of international reports, he maintained. EVEN AS he acknowledged that the health impacts of air pollution were “real” and “dangerous”, Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave on Friday contested some of the numbers presented in a new global report, which has identified India as the worst affected country and attributed more than a million deaths in the country in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Demonetisation Demon will gouge India's economic growth in 2016-17 by at least half a percentage point, chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian told reporters after presenting the Economic Survey a day before the budget. Subramanian, who was voicing his views for the first time on the deeply polarising subject of demonetisation, rejected the dire prophecies of other Oracles, including his former employer, the International Monetary Fund, that projected...

-The Hindu The growing chorus for a universal basic income is a ruse to eliminate or roll back significantly the public distribution system and signature welfare programmes The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining ground globally. While Switzerland held a referendum on it last year (it was voted down), Finland introduced it earlier this month. Media reports suggest that the government of India’s flagship Economic Survey this year...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The demonetisation-hit economy, which is expected to limp back to normalcy by the middle of this calendar year, may report a GDP growth rate of around 7 per cent for 2016-17, according to North Block economists. Of course, like all cautious economists, North Block's tribe of coffee swigging GDP forecasters and policy sherpas will add a ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), the Latin term that the followers...