-The Financial Express Buoyed by the success of the Give-It-Up campaign that coaxed over 1 crore households to forgo the subsidy on cooking gas, the Centre has written to all state governments seeking their support for a similar scheme to cut its rising food subsidy bill. Sources told FE that the Union food ministry in a communication to states has said Give-it-Up should be promoted under the Targeted Public Distribution System...

-The Hindu We as citizens are like that... we don’t want to pay taxes, shame on us: Justice Sikri Slamming a tendency in the country to evade taxes, the Supreme Court referred to the mandatory linking of Aadhaar to the Permanent Account Number (PAN) and Income Tax returns as an instance of the government’s efforts to bring “new and new laws to stop leakages.” “When tax evasions are there, the government will try...

-The Economic Times Aadhaar came with a lot of promises. They were brought by some of the brightest in India. Aadhaar promises to remove duplicates and ghosts from government databases, deliver subsidies to beneficiaries, collect taxes, provide financial inclusion and eliminate corruption. Here is why it cannot deliver anything it promises. Aadhaar came with a lot of promises. They were brought by some of the brightest in India. Promise 1: Removing Fraud and Duplicates In...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Jharkhand’s bureaucrats have denied thousands of farm workers their legally mandated livelihoods under the guise of plugging leakages in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), say activists. Earlier this month, HT reported that the ministry of rural development had cancelled 93 lakh MGNREGA job cards — of which 2.67 lakh cards were from Jharkhand — to weed out duplicates and cards corresponding to dead beneficiaries. At the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday questioned the Union government for making the Aadhaar biometric identification number mandatory for those getting a permanent account number (PAN) card from the income tax authorities. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, told a bench headed by Justice A.K. Sikri that the government has detected PAN cards based on fake documents. Rohatgi said there were instances of one person having multiple PAN...