-The Indian Express When announcing the decision on November 8, the government had said the then Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would cease to be legal tender and this would cleanse the system of black money. A parliamentary panel has come down heavily on demonetisation, describing it as one that not just inconvenienced the poor but also affected the manufacturing sector. “It was an effort to combat corruption, tax evasion and...

-Livemint.com Farm loan waivers are a bad idea. They were a bad idea in 2008 when the UPA was in power, and continue to be so in 2017 with the NDA in power Several parts of India are in the grip of an agrarian crisis. In part, this is because of the cumulative effect of bad monsoons. Farmers in many parts of India are still dependent on the annual rains which were deficient...

-Deccan Herald The last fig leaf of ‘voluntariness’ in Aadhaar dropped when the Lok Sabha passed the Finance Bill 2017 on March 22. The Finance Bill should never have been able to change Aadhaar, but we must remember that it was the same “money bill route” that gave birth to the Aadhaar Act a year ago. Classifying Aadhaar as a money bill was a brazen, unconstitutional and undemocratic strategy used to take...

Promises are made to be broken. In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made the promise that if it is elected to the Centre, it will then accord a high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship, among other things. But latest data on unemployment shared by the BJP MP Shri Bandaru Dattatreya in written form while replying to an unstarred question in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A clutch of legal amendments the Narendra Modi government has introduced to allow corporate political donors to mask their contributions drags the world's largest democracy against global currents of rising transparency in electoral funding, analysts and activists have warned. From Brazil to Bangladesh, and Croatia to Cyprus, countries of diverse sizes and varied histories with democracy have over the past decade adopted laws and rules aimed at making...