-Economic and Political Weekly The current regime seeks to reform labour laws with the understanding that these reforms will improve industrial growth and expand the possibilities of enterprise. However, there is already ample evidence from within India that this obsession with reforming labour law, particularly in the way the government has done it till now, will not take us any closer in creating more jobs or a healthy industrial sector. These...

-India Today New Delhi: The Food and Supply department has taken the social media route for encouraging Delhiites to expose loopholes, including pilferage, through sting operations in the public distribution system. Prior to this measure, the department had launched two toll-free numbers - 1967 and 1800-11-0841 - for the people to lodge their grievances. A call centre has also been functioning for taking up PDS related complaints. The call centre functions from...

-Deccan Chronicle Nizamabad: To prevent high-level irregularities in the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Nizamabad district administration has decided to introduce bio-metric system for supplying essentials to ration card holders. On a pilot basis, around 100 fair price (FP) shops will be adopted and the bio-metric system will be introduced to distribute essentials to the beneficiaries. As per the new system, any one of the family member of ration cardholder...

-The Hindu Business Line India now has the technology to track leakages at each stage in the public distribution system The Government has set up the Expenditure Management Commission to rationalise subsidies, among other expenditure items in India. India incurs nearly one per cent of food subsidy annually, generally utilised under the existing public distribution system (PDS) consisting of Food Corporation of India (FCI) and nearly five lakh Fair Price Shops (FPSs)....

-The Business Standard Make schemes mobile and portable, by focusing on people and not products India spends close to four per cent of its GDP on an alphabet soup of welfare schemes and subsidies - it has become a welfare state before becoming a developed state. Despite its significant costs, India's welfare system is neither comprehensive nor very effective - subject to huge leakages and corruption, and not well knit into...