-The Hindu The Electoral Bond Scheme inhibits the citizen’s capacity to meaningfully participate in political and public life Early this year the government introduced an Electoral Bond Scheme purportedly with a view to cleansing the prevailing culture of political sponsorship. But the programme’s failings have been so blindingly obvious, and its consequences so utterly devastating to rectitude and transparency in government, that even O.P. Rawat, who just retired Chief Election Commissioner, thought...

-Firstpost.com A report from rating agency CARE, released early this week, revealed that India's employment scenario is not looking good. It said job growth in corporate India moderated to 3.8 percent in fiscal year 2018, from 4.2 percent in the previous fiscal and the problem is most severe with smaller companies.     The report, based on an analysis of over 1,600 Corporates, said smaller companies with net sales of less than Rs...

-Livemint.com The problem escalated due to the government’s focus on infrastructure during 2002-09, especially with the efforts made to promote public-private partnerships The past two years or so have seen rapidly increasing stress in the Indian banking sector, with non-performing assets (NPAs) steadily climbing from under 3% to over 13% of total assets. Loan-loss provisioning for NPAs has seriously eroded the capital base of several banks, limiting their ability to make further...

-The Hindu Dissenters of the past in India were great moral agitators, introducing social, intellectual and spiritual turbulence in public life. Would they have survived today? Dissent is not only the “safety valve of democracy”, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reminded us, but vital for meaningful social life. Societies stultify when everyone converges on a single opinion or when official stories go unchallenged. Flaws congeal and social rot sets in. Right or wrong,...

-ThePrint.in Data shows 99.9% of all electoral bonds bought so far are worth Rs 10 lakh or 1 crore. These bonds do not bear name of the donor. New Delhi: Electoral bonds, brought in to make the system of political funding “more transparent”, seem to have further concentrated donations in the hands of Corporates and other high net-worth donors, instead of democratising them. Nearly 100 per cent of the bonds purchased so...