-Hindustan Times Kolkata/ Darjeeling/ Guwahati: More than five lakh workers in West Bengal’s biggest labour-intensive industries of tea and jute have not got wages since Wednesday when the union government withdrew two high-denomination currency notes. A similar predicament exists in neighbouring Assam and the rest of the Northeast, which has tea estates in remote areas where currency notes will take days to arrive. In Bengal, owners of several tea gardens and jute mills...

-Livemint.com Nandan Nilekani, one of the brains behind the Unified Payments Interface, on the near-term challenges of going cashless While the government’s decision to scrap Rs500 and Rs1,000 bank notes has been met with resistance from some quarters and been called too abrupt, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani backed it, saying it was needed to speed up the move to a cashless economy. “There is no question that this is a very bold...

-The Indian Express Ban on Rs 500, Rs 1000 notes deals with stocks of black money. But push to a cashless economy is premature. The sudden and dramatic announcement by the prime minister banning Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes issued by the Reserve Bank of India has a number of objectives. Among them are tackling counterfeit notes, curbing black money and restricting finance for subversive activities. While progress will be made by...

-The Indian Express It’s not as if the Centre cannot initiate reforms in agriculture. In fact, in at least three major areas, the onus for leadership and action lies with the Centre. For over a year, there have been news reports of Niti Aayog, the erstwhile Planning Commission’s new avatar, working on a wide-ranging reform package for India’s farm sector. In recent months, teasers have appeared hinting at the Centre’s plans of...

-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...