-The Hindu India needs to revisit its disease control strategy to ensure a more robust and humane response in similar crises January 30, 2021 marked one year since India detected its first case of COVID-19 — a student in Kerala who had returned from Wuhan, China. Analysing the country’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic so far reveals a mixed bag of successes and failures along with a host of unknowns looming ahead,...

-Hindustan Times The chairman of the 15th Finance Commission, NK Singh, spoke to Zia Haq about the final report of the Commission for 2021-26 which has now been made public. Edited excerpts. The Constitution, through Article 280 to 281, provides for finance commissions every five years as a mechanism for sharing of taxes and revenues vertically between the Centre and states; and horizontally among all states, based on levels of development, demographic...

-PTI/ The Hindu The Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre noted that the rising popularity of non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) along with e-commerce has also expanded the scope of digital payments. Over 2.9 lakh cyber security incidents related to digital banking were reported in 2020, Parliament was informed on Thursday. As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total number of 1,59,761;...

-Hindustan Times The data, culled from the education department of Delhi, and civic bodies that run the municipal schools, shows that these children have simply fallen off the map -- the schools say they can’t trace them. Over 166,000 students in Delhi’s government and municipal schools are missing, the impact of education moving online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The number is roughly 8.5% of the students enrolled in the...

-The Hindu Even with closures, capex exceeded plan, says Expenditure Secretary Expenditure Secretary T.V. Somanathan said the government has been very careful and realistic in its expenditure and receipts projections for 2021-22, and that its push for capital expenditure is the largest ever over a two-year period. Excerpts: * You have called it an expansionary budget, but overall spending is just about ₹33,000 crore in 2021-22 over this year’s revised estimates (RE). Also,...