-The Hindu The ‘batta’ system of rolling financing has shrunk as Money cannot be withdrawn from banks, and bearer cheques pile up Varanasi: For the already distressed weavers and poorly paid labourers in the famous Banarasi sari industry, demonetisation has come as a crippling blow. Withdrawal limits of Rs. 50,000 on current accounts (around a 10th of the actual requirement in the trade) and falling business post November 8 have constrained traders from...

-The Indian Express Governments are making Aadhaar mandatory in contravention of court orders One reason for the controversy surrounding the Aadhaar project is the pending litigation against it in the Supreme Court. The cases draw on substantive critiques, including exclusion and deprivation caused by the usage of Aadhaar in provisioning essential services such as the PDS and MGNREGA, breaches of individual privacy and threats to national and individual security in the way...

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) election manifesto for 2014 Lok Sabha election says that if elected to the Centre, it will then "(p)ut in place welfare measures for farmers above 60 years in age, small and marginal farmers and farm labours", among other things. Despite the formation of a BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre in 2014, the latest available data on farm suicides from the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Investigations by the income tax department have found that a large number of cooperative banks have been manipulating and laundering unaccounted Money post demonetisation of high denomination currency notes of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 on November 8. As the department's findings suggest a general absence of requisite regulatory oversight over cooperative banks across the country, the government feels the need for a strong regulatory framework. An...

-The Indian Express It’s for the first time that the NCRB has categorised farmers’ suicides due to debt or bankruptcy based on the source of loans. Local Moneylenders are usually portrayed as the villains in India’s farmer-suicides narrative, but government data shows that 80 per cent of farmers killed themselves in 2015 because of bankruptcy or debts after taking loans from banks and registered microfinance institutions. According to National Crime Records Bureau’s latest...