-Business Standard Restricts scope of life insurance cover to bring down burden on the exchequer The government has started applying exclusion principles to its inclusion scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). The life cover of Rs 30,000 announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for all those opening a bank account under the scheme will now exclude many. The finance ministry has put several riders for defining one's eligibility for a life...

-Mumbai Mirror Malnutrition isn't a rural worry. Worse, in Mumbai, it's not the lack of food but craving for junk that's proving fatal. Sammrudhi Pawar is playing with her two-anda-half-year-old brother Siddhartha. "Do you like Maggi?" we ask. She nods. "How many times can you eat it in a day?" One hand clinging to her dress, the four-year-old bends over a low stool placed outside the Dhobi Ghat centre of the Foundation...

In the midst of national debates over the need for labour laws reforms and the efficacy of MG-NREGA in checking distress migration, a new report brings spotlight on the miserable living and working conditions of unorganized migrant workers from Rajasthan. Titled Their Own Country: A Profile of Labor Migration from Rajasthan, the report prepared jointly by Aajeevika Bureau and UNESCO informs us that 70% of seasonal migrant workers from Rajasthan...

-The Hindustan Times The government is gearing up for its next big mission, a Rs. 113,000-crore plan that aims to usher in a digital revolution by moving everything online, from education to public services to bureaucracy. Aptly called ‘e-kranti', it comes under the Narendra Modi government's ‘Digital India' initiative and is quite simply the world's most ambitious broadband project - but one that will have to overcome countless hurdles, big and small....

-The Times of India Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, hereafter BP, have argued for phasing out the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in favour of cash transfers ("Rural Inefficiency Act", ToI, 23 October). It's surprising-and amusing-that two eminent economists have chosen to make a case based on prior beliefs and some sophomoric wordplay ('mis'leading economists), rather than on the available evidence. A survey by one of us of the empirical literature...