-The Financial Express In a column in The Financial Express, ("Time to tweak priority-sector lending", goo.gl/6O8AOL, February 6), the author made a case for "tweaking" priority-sector lending (PSL) norms which largely stipulate that the commercial banks direct credit towards certain vulnerable sectors and target population. Specifically, the article argued for revisiting the sectoral targets and cited a reduction in the share of agriculture sector in GDP as a valid reason...

-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: Growing unemployment has come to haunt the Naveen Patnaik government with the number of jobless persons in the state crossing the 10lakh figure. Official statistics show that more than 10.86 lakh jobless persons had registered with the 80 state-run employment exchanges in 2013. Of these, 8,034 were technical graduates, including 6,093 engineering graduates and 303 technical postgraduates. The figure reveals the plight of the state's educated youth as 1.7 crore...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Millions of villagers are on course to missing out on livelihood-sustaining work under the national job scheme this year if figures released by the government are any indication. The figures suggest that by the time this financial year draws to a close, far fewer families will have benefited under the scheme compared with 2013-14, while the number of persondays of work generated would also drop significantly. According to official...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Comptroller and Auditor General Shashi Kant Sharma on Tuesday emphasized on the need for mandatory social audit of social sector schemes as they lacked transparency and accountability. Speaking at a conference on social audit here, the CAG said expenditure of central and state governments that directly impacts socio-economic development was estimated to be Rs 17 lakh crore in 2013-2014. "This implies that an average of Rs 2,656...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Finance minister Arun Jaitley today promised gifts for children, women, patients and the poor but slashed his government's funding across the social sectors. Budget outlays for education, health, rural development, social justice and women and children have fallen sharply or remain close to the outlays these sectors had received last year. The allocation for children under the women and child development ministry witnessed the sharpest fall from last...