-The Hindu Business Line These bearer instruments can’t make political funding transparent; they don’t address the insidious corporate-politico nexus The Government is all set to introduce a scheme offering political Bonds as bearer instruments which will conceal the identity of the Bond buyers and enable a process of political donations that, it argues, will make funding political parties transparent. The argument is deeply flawed. Electoral Bonds as envisaged here open up yet another...

-TheWire.in Community managed rice banks have replaced defunct government managed rice banks in several areas of Patna district in Bihar. A few years ago, Parbhawati Devi, Bichiya Devi and Meena Devi were landless farm laborers, fully at the mercy of landed farmers for their survival. But things have changed since then. Today, hundreds of women in dozens of villages in Patna district of Bihar, mostly from the marginalised Mahadalit community, have turned...

-TheHoot.org Maharashtra’s farm daily Agrowon offered a counter to the SBI chief, the RBI governor, and English newspapers critical of the UP farm loan waiver. The Marathi agriculture daily Agrowon has criticized both the RBI governor Urjit Patel and State Bank of India’s Arundhati Bhattacharya  who have objected to the farm  loan waiver in Uttar Pradesh and similar demands elsewhere. The paper’s line is quite different from that of the mainstream English...

-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 Hindu ‘Time to build consensus on not making such poll promises’ Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel on Thursday stressed the need for building a national consensus on loan waiver schemes. Addressing a press conference here, he said this was needed so that promises such as loan waivers are not made during elections. “We need to create consensus so that such loan waiver promises are eschewed. Otherwise, sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in...