-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Linkage of MGNREGS accounts with an Aadhaar-linked payment (ALP) system significantly boosted efficiency of wage transfers, doubling funds transferred and increasing work allotted in times of distress as compared to previous years when demand actually dropped during economic stress due to leakage and delays in payments. An Indian School of Business study that examined annual data for blocks which had drought conditions in financial years 2012-2017...

-The Hindu Arvind Subramanian brought heft and pizzazz to his role as CEA — but who was listening? Arvind Subramanian has had quite a paradoxical tenure as the Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Finance Minister. While he brought a lot of pizzazz and heft back to the usually staid Economic Surveys and lent his voice to a number of pressing economic issues, the government repeatedly failed to heed his advice or...

  The outcome of a social audit (conducted in April this year) related to the pilot cash transfer programme in the public distribution system (PDS) in Nagri block (Ranchi district) has confirmed that most beneficiaries want back the normal ration system that existed previously. Yet the Jharkhand state government continues with the DBT-based PDS in Nagri block, instead of returning back to the older system, says a press release by the...

-Livemint.com The ratio of currency in circulation as share of broad money is back at pre-demonetisation levels, according to Reserve Bank of India data On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the “demonetisation” of high-value currency notes. When it became clear the ex ante goals of reducing corruption and black money were unlikely to succeed, attention shifted to a range of possible ex post facto rationales for the move. Numerous...

-The Economic Times The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet. As the network effects compound, disruptive acceleration hurtle us towards financial utopia, or dystopia. Our fate depends on what we get right and what we get wrong with the law, code and architecture, and the market. The Internet, unfortunately, has completely transformed from how it was first architected. From a...