-The Hindu The recent PLFS data, which show a historic decline in manufacturing employment, make one fact PLAin — India desperately needs a comprehensive industrial policy, absent since 1991 The Union Budget suggests that the government has not recognised the need to create more manufacturing jobs. For the first time ever, manufacturing jobs fell in absolute terms between 2011-12 and 2017-18, to quote the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the National...

-The Telegraph Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget spells out the colossal failure that the draft NEP is fated to be In her budget speech on July 5, the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, reiterated the government’s PLAn of bringing in a new National Education Policy, thereby initiating “major changes in both school and higher education”. Her announcement comes close on the heels of a draft NEP published by the ministry of human resource development in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Census 2021 will for the first time seek information from households on smartphones, DTH/Cable TV connection, internet access, number of members of households having bank accounts, ownership of house other than the rented accommodation of a household, bottled water availability and mobile number as part of the houselisting procedure. Importantly, the latest census, as per the existing PLAn, will not collect caste data. While the socio-economic...

-The Hindu Protesters launch mass RTI campaign, raise questions on controversial issues New Delhi: Right to Information activists attempting to deliver a petition against the RTI Amendments Bill to the President via his Secretariat were detained outside Rashtrapati Bhavan on Thursday. Later, they launched a new campaign to bombard the government with a mass RTI campaign raising queries on prickly issues of public interest, from the Unnao rape case and the Rafale defence...

-Hindustan Times Still, doubts about EVMs have been PLAnted, despite the fact that none of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines showed a mismatch with the EVM count. Two months after the declaration of Lok Sabha election results, conspiracy theories about possible tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are still doing the rounds. That important opposition leaders have demanded a return to paper ballots and even openly supported EVM-rigging...