-PTI Mamata Banerjee stages reversal of former apathy towards fate of those affected by Saradha Group demise Kolkata: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee staged a reversal of her former apathy towards the fate of those whose savings had disappeared amid the collapse of the deposit-taking Saradha Group. Having said on Monday that "what has gone, has gone", Banerjee on Wednesday announced a 10 percentage point hike in value-added tax (VAT) on tobacco...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-DNA Dharmenddra Pawar, 35, could regain his mental balance only after he saw his answer paper procured through an RTI. For, only then he saw the examiners' apathy and not the failure of his hard work that led to absolute distress and him repeating the year. "I could not understand that in the first attempt I scored 27 marks and 0 in the second when I had put in more effort," said...

-Economic and Political Weekly Before I take issue with some of the points made in the NIPFP response to this comment, it may be useful to recapitulate a few points on which there appears to be agreement: (1) Aadhaar-integration can resolve only certain types of leakages, for which reliable data is unavailable; this was not adequately accounted for in the cost-benefit exercise; (2) the NIPFP study has a fragile basis (in...

-Medianama.com Note: Following this report, other publications and civil society organizations are providing more context on this development. We’ve curating read-worthy updates here as a followup to this post. Important: CERT-IN’s Gulshan Rai has said that blocks have been implemented on the basis of an order issued by a Court in Gwalior, according to a report from Livemint. Hence, DoT is only implementing the Court’s instructions. Earlier today: India’s Department of Telecommunications yesterday...