-The Economic Times In over a decade, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been instrumental in providing employment to rural households. One of its key provisions is that once the work week is completed, the worker must be paid within 15 days. Millions depend on the timely payment of these wages. The payments process has made many strides in the last decade, from cash payments to wages being...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Hackers appear to have stolen data from the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which manages over Rs 8.5 lakh crore in pension funds, by burrowing through an Aadhaar seeding platform. The EPFO tried to play down the seriousness of the data hack by suggesting that the data busters hadn't managed to break into its servers but had exploited certain vulnerabilities in a gateway which is managed by CSC...

-The Hindu Business Line A study of Farmer Producer Organisations in Bihar show mixed results — some successes but several challenges too The government has this lofty goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. Among the different instruments to achieve this goal, promotion of new and scaling up of existing Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) have been given focus. Given the extremely small landholdings, FPOs, through collectivisation, which leads to economies of scale, are...

-The Economic Times New Delhi: The government is planning to rope in domain experts from within and outside the country to ensure a smooth rollout and monitoring of ‘Ayushman Bharat’, its ambitious health insurance scheme for the poor. Niti Aayog, the government’s premier think tank, will come out with guidelines for setting up the project monitoring unit (PMU) for Ayushman Bharat, also known as National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), an official told...

-NDTV The Information and Broadcasting Ministry headed by Smriti Irani has set up a committee that will discuss and recommend a regulatory framework for online media. New Delhi: The government has amped up a move to regulate online media and news portals just after it was forced to take back a controversial order on punishing journalists for fake news on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry headed by...