-The Hindu Petition says the entity did not figure in the list of ‘Payment System Operators’ authorised by the RBI The Delhi High Court on Wednesday asked the Reserve Bank of India how could Google’s mobile payment app, Google Pay, operate in India as a payment transaction system without the requisite authorisation. A Bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A.J. Bhambhani issued notice to the RBI and Google India on a...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of forest. How many Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ forest destruction? Stripping these forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these forestlands...

-TheWire.in Issues tied to forest governance require a collaborative approach rather than narrow court action on the Forest Rights Act. The Supreme Court order related to the “eviction” of tribal and forest-dwelling communities has made big news. The February 13 order directing state governments to initiate action against all those with “rejected” claims has reignited longstanding ideological disputes over India’s forest governance. Reactions to the recent order in a case filed by Wildlife...

-The Hindu Business Line Implementation issues in Fasal Bima Yojana need to be addressed A BusinessLine series from perennially drought-prone Jalna and Parbhani districts in Maharashtra has brought to the fore implementation lapses in the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). Farmers have not been compensated for crop damage, owing to multiple factors. Chief among these is irregularities in crop cutting experiments. The CCEs are meant to be carried in the presence...

  The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...