-The Telegraph Figures in May take the total amount of money invested in this opaque source of funding since January to Rs 4,794 crore Electoral bonds accounting for the maximum amount of political donations in India in May were sold in Calcutta, according to information accessed by a citizen through the Right to Information route. Of the bonds worth Rs 822 crore that were sold in select outlets of the State Bank of...

-The Hindu DoPT says search committee’s deliberations are exempted under the Act The Centre has refused to reveal details of the ongoing selection process for four new Central Information Commissioners, despite a Supreme Court order directing it to do so. The only information disclosed is that 256 people have applied for the four vacant positions, which were advertised five months ago. In its reply to a Right to Information request, the Department of...

-Macroscan.org Vikas Rawal and Prachi Bansal analyse data from the just-released Periodic Labour Force Survey to show the serious contraction of employment across states and most of the major sectors of the economy. Please click here to access the entire article. ...

-Livemint.com If there is no way to tell which part of the economy is doing well and which is not, policymakers will continue to have to rely on rough proxies and their intuition for decision-making A month after statisticians from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) published a report exposing holes in one of the key databases used in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) calculations the controversy around India’s new GDP series...

-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC)  resigned allegedly...