-ThePrint.in Modi government’s proposed amendments to one of India’s most powerful laws will reduce autonomous information commissions to 'caged parrots'. India’s Right to Information Act is under attack. Surreptitiously, and without any public consultation, the Narendra Modi government introduced a bill in Parliament that aims to undermine the independence of information commissions – the final adjudicators under the RTI law. The bill was passed on 22 July by the Lok Sabha, where...
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CAG demonstrates how govt relies on off-budget resources to fund deficit - Dinesh Narayanan
-The Economic Times India’s deficit numbers have come under lens as the govt is increasingly depending on off-budget borrowings. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has said that the central government’s key deficit figures may be considerably higher than those stated in the union budget. In a presentation to the 15th Finance Commission (FFC) on July 8, three days after the July 5 budget, CAG has asked whether the extra-budgetary resources accounted for...
More »Names on Assam NRC draft list to be under scrutiny again
-The Telegraph The 'Additional Exclusion List' will have names of those who figured in the draft NRC published on July 30, 2018, but were 'subsequently found ineligible for inclusion' People who have been included in the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) list cannot rest assured of their citizenship status. A new notification by the NRC state coordinator's office, posted on their social media page on Thursday, says about an “Additional List...
More »Is India overestimating its economic growth? -TCA Sharad Raghavan
-The Hindu The new GDP series has some methodological and sampling problems Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian recently claimed in a paper that India’s GDP growth from 2011-12 to 2016-17 was likely to have been overestimated. The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council has rejected this claim, stating that his paper would “not stand the scrutiny of academic or policy research standards”. In a conversation moderated by T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan, Pronab Sen...
More »Why the integrity of data matters -A Vaidyanathan
-The Hindu The merger of the NSSO into the Central Statistics Office is a cause for concern The announcement that the government has decided to merge the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) into and under the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has caused both surprise and concern. What exactly the ‘merger’ means remains unclear. Recent attempts to question the veracity of National Sample Survey (NSS) data and the way the issue has been...
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