-The Times of India JAIPUR: Across the country, payments worth Rs 9,124 crore are yet to be paid for work done in the 2016-17 Financial year under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). This comes at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has created incentive schemes for rewarding those using the digital payment platform. Only days ago, 20-year-old Maharashtra student Shradha Mengshette was surprised to win Rs1...

-Frontline.in The Aadhaar project’s headlong push towards “total” enrolment of Indian citizens threatens the privacy of individuals on an unprecedented scale, while its patchy biometric system acts as a tool of denial for the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, the UID chugs along, regardless, fuelled by the avarice of private interests who seek to cash in on citizen data. IN the last seven years, the right to privacy of Indian citizens has been...

-The Indian Express Urjit Patel has voiced concern publicly over the latest loan waiver — saying it engendered a moral hazard and undermined the honest credit culture. In February 1990, in the months preceding the build-up to the balance of payments crisis the next year, Madhu Dandavate, Finance Minister in V P Singh’s National Front government, announced a debt relief scheme for farmers to fulfill a promise made by the alliance in...

-Livemint.com The richest household’s assets are worth much more than that of all the others combined and the same conclusion holds if we take the distribution of rural assets We all know that Credit Suisse reckons that the richest 1% of Indians own 58.4% of the nation’s wealth, up from 36.8% in 2000. What is perhaps not so well-known is that, according to the Credit Suisse report, the bottom 70% of Indians...

-Livemint.com Farm loan waivers are a bad idea. They were a bad idea in 2008 when the UPA was in power, and continue to be so in 2017 with the NDA in power Several parts of India are in the grip of an agrarian crisis. In part, this is because of the cumulative effect of bad monsoons. Farmers in many parts of India are still dependent on the annual rains which were deficient...