-The Economic Times New Delhi: The government is planning to rope in domain experts from within and outside the country to ensure a smooth rollout and monitoring of ‘Ayushman Bharat’, its ambitious health insurance scheme for the poor. Niti Aayog, the government’s premier think tank, will come out with guidelines for setting up the project monitoring unit (PMU) for Ayushman Bharat, also known as National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), an official told...

-The Telegraph Calcutta: Calcutta High Court on Thursday stalled the panchayat election process and asked the state election commission to explain by Monday what it had done about the complaints of prospective Opposition candidates being prevented from filing nomination. "Till the court passes any further order on this issue, the state election commission is directed to stall the election process," Justice Subrata Talukdar said in an interim order on a BJP petition. This...

-NDTV (with inputs from IANS)   RTI responses on EVMs have highlighted irregularities in everything from the number of voting machines the Election Commission bought to the price it paid for them. New Delhi: Responses to a series of Right to Information requests have thrown up multiple red flags in the Election Commission's acquisition and use of EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines. From huge inconsistencies in the records of the machines acquired...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre is considering doubling the monthly pay of the country's 25 lakh midday meal cook-cum-helpers to Rs 2,000, but the unions say the proposed raise is too little. The cooks' current pay of Rs 1,000 - a fraction of the official minimum wages - has been static since 2009, with successive governments keeping a proposed hike pending for the past five years. Now, a year before the general...

-IndiaToday.in Rising prices including those of petrol and diesel were among the reasons that brought down the UPA government of Manmohan Singh, whom the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had described as a "Sardar (chief), who is not asardar (effective)". In May 2012, the UPA government had approved the steepest ever hike in petrol prices across the country. The petrol prices suddenly went up by Rs 7.54 per litre. Petrol price...