-Firstpost.com Development economist Jean Dreze has been vociferous critic of the Narendra Modi government's demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes a year back. He had famously warned that "demonetisation in a booming economy is like shooting at the tyres of a racing car". A year on, it seems his caution has come true. In the first quarter of the current financial year, the GDP growth slowed to a three-year...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Demonetisation and the subsequent push for digitisation has escalated risks relating to cyber crime and India needs to urgently upgrade its defences by setting up a cyber security commission on the lines of the Atomic Energy and Space Commissions, according to an IIT Kanpur study shared with Parliament's committee on finance. Noting that the government has initiated a number of programmes to enhance the participation of...

-The Hindu Sans quality jobs, ‘aspirational young India’ will become ‘angry young India’ The government – and PayTM – may not agree, but there are some downsides to the rising digitisation and connectivity. One is an unleashing of aspirations. Everyone wants not just what Bengal’s leftists used to contemptuously dismiss as components of the middle-class Indian dream — gaadi, baadi, chaakri (car, home, job) — but a whole lot of other things....

PayTM's founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma was in the news recently for signing a deal to purchase a Rs. 82 crore worth property in Lutyens’ Delhi. He is credited with the growth of PayTM's mobile wallet services, which is currently being used by over 220 million users across the country. Although PayTM was launched in 2010, the popularity of its mobile wallet services and payment gateway among the ordinary citizens grew...

-IndiaSpend This puts in peril the government's target to achieve 25 billion digital transactions in 2017-18 The value of digital transactions nationwide declined marginally (1.5%) to Rs 92.6 lakh crore ($1.4 trillion) in February 2017 from Rs 94 lakh crore in November 2016 ($1.42 trillion), according to representative data (provisional) on electronic payments released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The data do not cover all transactions across all banks. But, card...