-The Times of India BHOPAL: At a time when suicides by farmers in Madhya Pradesh following scanty rain and poor yield have brought back focus on their plight, allegedly more than 1.77 lakh ghost farmers benefitted from interest subsidies on their loans. Putting a question mark on the much hyped 0% interest farm loan scheme of the state government, a series of RTI queries by TOI revealed that between 2007-08 and 2012-13,...

-Scroll.in   An audit of ration shops after the introduction of Aadhaar revealed that many genuine beneficiaries couldn’t collect food grain due to system glitches. The Modi government’s insistence on the use of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, to weed out “ghosts, Fakes, duplicates” from social welfare schemes is counterproductively excluding genuine beneficiaries from the programmes. In Andhra Pradesh, an official audit conducted after ration shops adopted the Aadhaar system revealed that many...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: At a time when the Centre is planning to link Aadhaar for government schemes and a large number of people are lining up for enrolment, an RTI application has revealed that the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has identified more than 25,000 duplicate Aadhaar numbers in the country till August. Vinod Ranganathan of onlineRTI.com, who filed the application, said he had sought state-wise number of dubious/Fake...

-The Hindu Cheap imported bags are sold as Indian to government agencies for a higher procurement price. The Union Textiles Ministry has unearthed a major racket in large-scale import of cheap jute bags from Nepal and Bangladesh by Indian manufacturers, many of whom were supplying these to government agencies after putting their own seals. The Jute Packaging Materials (Compulsory Use in Packing Commodities) Act, 1987, mandates that jute bags supplied to government agencies...

-Hindustan Times In August this year, whiteflies -- a notorious pest -- bumbled through vast tracts of Punjab’s cotton fields, destroying a sizeable chunk of the crop in the state. These insects, which slurp on juicy, tender bolls, seemed to have inflicted heavy losses, sparking a serious farm crisis in India’s agricultural powerhouse in a decade. A back-to-back drought meant farmers grew more cotton, a hardy crop that requires less water to...