-Business Standard Fingerprint failure reports of existing Aadhaar-linked PDS cases not revealed The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has decided to complete the linking the bank accounts to Aadhaar numbers of all the beneficiaries of large social schemes, including the National Food Security Act, by March 2017. Once done, the delivery of these schemes would be based on biometric authentication linked to Aadhaar or direct cash transfers to linked bank accounts of...

-The Indian Express PDS has improved in the state, but it’s still not up to the mark. Recent media reports suggest that the public distribution system (PDS) in West Bengal is now “doing enormously well” — as one headline put it. Some also claim that this has contributed to the victory of the Trinamool Congress in the latest assembly elections. Since we were involved in the survey cited in these reports, we...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

-The Hindu Business Line Even though technological changes imperil many jobs, care services are unlikely to be affected thanks to the significance of face-to-face human interaction involved in them Across the world there is much gloom and doom about the impact of technological changes on jobs, as automation and other innovations are seen to threaten not just blue-collar jobs but also many forms of office work. It is true that the way...

-Frontline The inability to resolve pressing problems with respect to the production, distribution and availability of food is one of the important failures of the entire economic reform process. IN the fateful month of July 1991, when the devaluation of the Indian rupee presaged the introduction of a whole series of liberalising economic reforms, agriculture was very far from the minds of most policymakers and commentators. The immediate focus was on...