-The Hindu The PMJDY celebrates success on its website, but thousands of Marys remain outside the banking system. This won’t change unless the scheme alters both design and implementation A few months ago, when the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was still being spoken of as a success for the largest number of accounts opened in a day, earning the government a Guinness world record, I visited the branch of a...

-The New Indian Express The problem of farmer suicides has assumed a serious proporition. The toll is increasing year after year. According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), as many as 5,650 farmers committed suicide in India last year. This works out to one farmer suicide in every 100 villages or one farmer suicide in every block in the country last year. State-wise, Maharashtra accounted for the highest number of...

-The Indian Express The SC directive that Aadhaar can’t be made mandatory for any service — which the government can’t oppose until Aadhaar gets legal validity — has complicated the issue. On January 1, 2013, the Congress-led UPA government launched the Direct Benefits Transfer scheme, centred around the Aadhaar project begun a few years earlier. Teething troubles and implementation bottlenecks followed, the interest of the outgoing dispensation waned, and both Aadhaar...

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...

-The Telegraph Standard model: The state provides a poor woman employment for 58 days a year, under the 100-day job guarantee scheme, at (Bengal's) daily wage rate of Rs 169. Cost: about Rs 20,000 over two years. Alternative: The state provides her an asset - maybe a small grocery - teaches her to run it and monitors her progress while giving a daily stipend for her consumption needs and ensuring basic healthcare...