-Livemint.com The ministry of statistics claims that the payroll data for the most recent months are provisional and again, data for every month is being revised New Delhi: The government’s latest payroll data sourced from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) points towards the fact that earlier growth numbers may have been exaggerated. In April, when the centre FIRst released the jobs data, it said that between September 2017 and February 2018, India...

-Hindustan Times Election Commission of India (ECI) is outgunned when it comes to confronting those who circumvent existing campaign finance rules and lacks power to sanction candidates. It is a truism to note that political finance sits at the heart of corruption in modern India. While politicians publicly lament the status quo, they privately profit from the current system. Therefore, the fact that the Narendra Modi government has made reforming political finance...

-Livemint.com One of the big drivers of the ruling BJP’s massive victory in 2014 was its ability to exploit inequalities within caste groups to expand its support base New Delhi: When we think of caste-based inequality in India, we typically think of a pyramid where scheduled castes (SCs or Dalits) and scheduled tribes (STs) are at the bottom, other backward classes (OBCs) above them, and upper castes at the very top....

-FIRstpost.com The recent increases in minimum support prices have attracted two criticisms from two opposite sides. One is that this is less than what farmers deserve, the second is that this is populist and ignores larger macro side effects. The increase in fair remunerative price for sugarcane has also been criticised for not adequately addressing the woes of the sugar sector. Ramesh Chand, member, agriculture, NITI Aayog talks to FIRstpost on...

-Newsclick.in Leaking EPFO enrolment numbers, and tall tales about trucks and buses, and doctors and engineers, marked PM Modi’s deceptive claims on jobs in his Lok Sabha speech. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when at FIRst we start to deceive" wrote Sir Walter Scott two centuries ago. The Modi govt.’s attempt to create data on non-existent jobs confirms this truth. Since last year, an increasingly cornered govt. has been marshalling all...