-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government has made the Aadhaar card mandatory for opening bank accounts and conducting financial transactions of Rs 50,000 and above. Those with existing accounts will also have to submit their unique identification number by the end of December. Not disclosing it by December 31 will lead to suspension of the account. While the income tax department had earlier announced the decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for...

-The Tribune Farmers are determined to take it to a logical conclusion SOMETHING unusual happened last week. Farmers in Maharashtra organised an amazing ‘strike’. Last month farmers in a village of Ahmednagar decided that they would stop sending their produce  — food grains, vegetables, etc. — to cities from June 1. Soon, the call was adopted by the farmers of the entire district. Before anyone could realise, this resolve had extended to...

-The Hindu Deny Maharashtra Chief Minister’s claim that strike has been called off. Mumbai: Unanimously agreeing to continue the farmers’ strike in Maharashtra, a core committee meeting in Nasik on Sunday decided to call a State-wide bandh on Monday, excluding Mumbai. Farmers began their strike on Thursday demanding farm loan waiver and support price for their produce. In a meeting with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday morning, a section of farmer leaders...

-Livemint.com All our solutions in agriculture, besides management issues, are going to come from science and technology, says Deepak Pental, innovator of GM mustard Last week, the environment ministry’s regulator, the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), cleared the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard, leaving it to the government to take a final call. If approved, it will be India’s first food crop developed using transgenic technology, 15 years after Bt...

-Outlook Policy think-tank Niti Aayog has suggested outsourcing of public services to private hands in order to reduce dependence on the government administrative machinery. It has also recommended induction of specialists into the governance system through lateral entry, a move which, it says, will bring "competition to the established career bureaucracy". In its draft report on a three-year action agenda made public recently, the Niti Aayog has set a target of full- digitisation...