-The Telegraph A sizeable portion of collections under the Primary Education Cess was never transferred to Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh The money every taxpayer pays towards the Primary Education Cess, meant to improve the quality of government schooling in the country, is not being used entirely for the purpose. A sizeable portion of the collections under the 2 per cent cess was never transferred to the Prarambhik Shiksha Kosh (PSK), the dedicated corpus...

-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has increased after the Modi...

-Down to Earth The scheme's Management Information System destroys local accountability, promotes centralisation and administrative control and gives out wrong data There is an increasing tendency in the Union government to show performances of central schemes, especially social welfare programmes, through data captured by the Management Information System (MIS). It is indeed a matter of astonishment how the MIS data always shows high performances of schemes and programmes, while ground surveys and...

-The Hindu Lacking personnel, funds and motivation, the thana is not structured to enforce the rule of law The death of inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, shot while trying to control a mob of cow vigilantes in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, is a vivid expression of the contempt of our ruling classes, and those aligned to them, for the rule of law. The increasing number of human sacrifices for the alleged protection...

-The Hindu Business Line Home-grown payment systems corner over 60% of digital transactions New Delhi: India’s own Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) and RuPay cards have garnered over 60 per cent market share of the digital transactions business, pushing back global giants such as Mastercard and Visa. BHIM is a UPI-based payment interface that allows real-time Fund Transfer using a single identity, typically a mobile number or a name. Unified Payments Interface (UPI)...