-The Times of India MUMBAI: Electronic payments have become safer for consumers with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) introducing the concept of 'zero liability' and 'limited liability' for bank customers for any card or online fraud. The central bank has also made it mandatory for banks to register all customers for text message alerts and permit reporting of unauthorized transactions through a reply to the alert message. The proposal to limit...

-GovernanceNow.com Banning cattle slaughter, like demonetisation, may deliver political gains but will hit the rural economy hard More than a century ago, a team of officials from Brazil toured some villages of Kheda district, in central Gujarat. They had come to procure breeding bulls of the famous Kankreji breed, notes Bhailal Patel, a charismatic institution-builder who was also the first leader of opposition in Gujarat assembly, in his memoirs. It was of...

-The Telegraph. Lucknow: Around 5,500 of the nearly 8,000 panchayat chiefs in BJP-ruled Uttarakhand have resigned to protest an alleged reduction in the budget for rural development. The panchayat chiefs are also protesting the Trivendra Singh Rawat government's refusal to increase their monthly honorarium from Rs 750 to Rs 5,000. The panchayat chiefs have been agitating for the past three days. Girveer Parmar, the state president of the Uttarakhand Gram Pradhan Sangathan, said 5,500...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Narendra Modi dispensation, which has used social media as a force multiplier and reaped huge political dividends, is now having to reckon with its rumour-spreading powers that threaten to throw a spanner in the government's GST blitz. In the first three days of the rollout of the new tax regime, the finance ministry has had to step in twice to counter rumours that were spreading like wildfire...

-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...