-Ideas for India In this article, Pronab Sen, Country Director for the India Central Programme of the International Growth Centre, argues that India’s recent demonetisation has penalised virtually the entire informal sector, and perhaps damaged it permanently. At the stroke of the midnight hour of 9 November 2016, India lost 86% of its monetary base. The media – print, electronic and social – has been fulsome in its praise of Prime Minister...

-Scroll.in A large section of women in India are out of the banking system, and the currency withdrawal has hit them hard. The helpline rang all day at the women’s crisis centre in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, on Wednesday. Counsellors took calls from women wondering what to do with their hard-earned savings after Prime Minister Narenda Modi in a surprise television address to the nation the night before had announced the demonetisation of...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes is unlikely to help the government suck out black money from the economy as hoarders keep a tiny portion of their ill-gotten wealth in hard cash, going by income-tax data. Cash recovery has been less than 6% of the undisclosed income seized from tax evaders, shows an HT analysis of data from tax raids from financial year 2012-13 onwards. In...

-Business Standard There is a widespread panic among farmers, who were preparing for the next Rabi season New Delhi: There is a widespread panic among farmers, who had recently harvested their paddy crop, and were preparing for the next Rabi season. They fear that in the absence of new currency notes they will miss out on the crucial sowing time. This is most crucial time for a farmer when he not only...

-Hindustan Times Kolkata/ Darjeeling/ Guwahati: More than five lakh workers in West Bengal’s biggest labour-intensive industries of tea and jute have not got wages since Wednesday when the union government withdrew two high-denomination currency notes. A similar predicament exists in neighbouring Assam and the rest of the Northeast, which has tea estates in remote areas where currency notes will take days to arrive. In Bengal, owners of several tea gardens and jute mills...