-The Hindu The party recommended that electoral bonds should be issued without any serial number or identification marks. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had pitched for greater anonymity for donors of electoral bonds, according to a letter sent by party general secretary Bhupendra Yadav to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in August 2017 when the scheme was being drafted. This letter was obtained by activist Lokesh Batra through a Right to Information application. The...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Give farmers their due credit -Ashok Gulati & Ritika Juneja
-The Indian Express All crop loans should be routed through Kisan Credit Cards. This will ensure that farmers do not use the loans for non-agricultural purposes. Normally, a sector’s credit off-take is a sign of its health. Higher the off-take, the better the sector’s performance. There has been a healthy off-take of ground-level credit (GLC) in agriculture and allied sectors. In the financial year (FY) 2018-19, Banks disbursed Rs 12.55 trillion...
More »Tribal woman who teaches Sanskrit says qualification alone should matter -Bishwanath Ghosh
-The Hindu People may have long stopped speaking Sanskrit, but I don’t find a decline in interest in the subject, says Sarathi Hembram. Kolkata: Sarathi Hembram lives in a rural pocket of West Bengal, where life is largely untouched by the acrimonious political arguments vitiating social media, but she is aware what’s going on in the Banaras Hindu University at the moment. Thanks to TV, she has got to know about the protests...
More »The opacity around electoral bonds -Trilochan Sastry
-The Hindu If big money entirely funds elections in a secretive way, democracy as we know it will not exist The recent disclosures that the Election Commission (EC) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had expressed reservations about the Electoral Bonds scheme highlight the importance of this issue. In 2017, the then RBI Governor wrote to the then Finance Minister that “allowing any entity other than the central Bank to issue...
More »Rich love electoral bonds: More than 91% donations over Rs 1 crore each -Udit Misra
-The Indian Express The RTI documents also show that over the 12 phases, just four cities accounted for 83 per cent of all electoral bonds by value. Electoral bonds with denomination of Rs 1 crore accounted for more than 91 per cent of the Rs 5,896 crore raised in the first eleven of the total twelve phases over which bonds were sold by select branches of the State Bank of India. ...
More »