-The Hindu There has been sharp rise in the NPAs amid COVID-19 pandemic With unemployment rising, the ability of those who have taken education loans to pay back has come down sharply. As a result, the non-performing assets (NPAs) have increased in the last one-and-a-half years. R. Nagarajan had taken a loan for his engineering course and started repaying it when he got a job at a start-up in the second half of...

-IANS/ The New Indian Express The Pegasus Project, a consortium of international news organisations, believes the leaked data is indicative of potential targets identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts. NEW DELHI: The Pegasus snoop list has 40 Indian journalists and forensic tests confirm presence of Pegasus spyware on some devices, The Wire reported. Those on leaked list of potential targets include journalists at Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Wire, Indian Express,...

-The Telegraph The party suspects that the removal of Ravi Shankar Prasad in the cabinet shuffle could be linked to fear of a controversy erupting in the upcoming Parliament session The Congress on Saturday said the latest report by the Comptroller & Auditor General of India points to a scam in the ministry of electronics and information technology, suspecting that the removal of Ravi Shankar Prasad in the recent cabinet reshuffle could...

-The Hindu Existing laws on juvenile justice, bonded labour and POCSO sufficient, say experts. The emphasis on criminalisation and policing instead of welfare measures in the new proposed anti-trafficking Bill makes it anti-migrants and anti-sex workers, warn experts. The Ministry of Women and Child Development recently placed the Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2021, in the public domain and sought stakeholders' comments till July 14. The Bill is also scheduled...

-The Hindu Lower stunting among children with mothers who had access to free school lunches, shows data from 1993-2016. Girls who had access to the free lunches provided at government schools, had children with a higher height-to-age ratio than those who did not, says a new study on the inter-generational benefits of India’s midday meal scheme published in Nature Communications this week. Using nationally representative data on cohorts of mothers and their children...