-TheWire.in Most of the outreach efforts of the finance ministry to explain and create awareness about the GST have been with the bigger industry players. It is becoming increasingly clear that that neither the Centre nor states are adequately prepared to launch the goods and services tax (GST) on July 1. The sheer multiplicity of taxes, as also different tax slabs for the same commodity or service, is a problem which has...

-Hindustan Times Lucknow: Not just buffalo meat, Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow is fast heading towards a non-vegetarian crisis as entire chicken, goat meat and egg markets have begun shutting down. While more than 80% markets of non-vegetarian items already downed shutters on Friday, various traders’ associations have declared strike from Saturday. Under the circumstances, vegetable prices, which were on the decline for last one week, are likely to register a steep hike. “The indefinite...

-TheCitizen.in NEW DELHI: Perhaps no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetization debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to the palpable failure of the demonetization measure to achieve its purported objective, which was to cripple the black economy, the government kept harping, in its justification, on the extraordinary...

-Business Standard System in place for Aadhaar-linked payment through state but Shopkeepers and consumers yet to cheer Ahmedabad: When young housewife Sarojben Rabari comes to buy rice from the Public Distribution System (PDS) shop in Ramnagar, on the northern fringes here, the shopkeeper asks her to pay by using her Aadhaar card. The woman refuses – she has neither an Aadhaar card or a bank account. She wishes to pay in cash;...

-The Hindu Anger and frustration dominate discussions on demonetisation at a jan sunwai in Beawar, Rajasthan About five-six hundred people are crowded in and around a small shamiana-covered triangle, like the apex of the letter A. The two arms of the A are busy streets typical of small-town India, a press of pedestrians and two-wheelers punctuated with foraging cows, goats and impatient cars and tempos. Including the Shopkeepers and hangers-on across the...