-Firstpost.com The year is due to end, and the report card for India's flagship financial inclusion programme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana for 2018 is out. Before diving into the specifics of the programme, it would be useful to remember that the year has been revelatory with regard to women's issues, from the #MeToo movement to the 217 years that it will apparently take to close the gender pay gap. In...

-The Telegraph World Bank report suggests that 33% of the Jan Dhan Accounts were opened by people who already had bank accounts New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday said the Jan Dhan Accounts, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes, were “an exercise in mass deception”, aimed at creating propaganda tools for “self-praise” rather than the avowed objective of financial inclusion of the poor. “By December 2016, twenty-four per cent of the...

-The Indian Express NREGA is a demand-driven programme and if the demand vanishes because wages are low and uncertain, nothing will be able to save it. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is going through a deep crisis of delayed and failed wage payments. The problem is not new, but it is more serious than ever and threatens to undermine the entire programme. The crisis has at least four manifestations: Delayed payments,...

-Business Standard Over the past four years, through its twin policies of Jan Dhan Yojana and demonetisation, the govt has taken necessary steps to expand banking services substantially. Mumbai: People’s demand for cash continues to head northwards compared to pre-demonetisation levels despite the frequency of digital transactions going up and a substantial increase in bank deposits since November 2016. Currency with the public (CwP), or people’s demand for cash or currency, is 7...

-The Indian Express Women form 80 per cent of urban migrants, but public policy is blind to their concerns. A recent UN report says India is on the “brink of an urban revolution”, as its population in towns and cities are expected to reach 600 million by 2031. Fuelled by migration, megacities of India (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) will be among the largest urban concentrations in the world. Interestingly, the 2011 Census...