-TheWire.in From rotten vegetables to frogs, the MDM in Uttar Pradesh has featured several unlikely ingredients. In a village in Chitrakoot district, while insects were the latest buzz, a severe dose of apathy appears to be the real cause of alarm. Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh: The website of the Uttar Pradesh Mid-Day Meal Authority (MDMA) proudly boasts of having won a gold trophy in “e-governance” for its innovative use of technology in...

-Hindustan Times The issue of money in politics is a matter of pressing concern across the democratic world. Recent headlines, for instance, reveal that scandals linked with political finance irregularities dot the globe. In France, former president Nicolas Sarkozy is being investigated on allegations that his 2007 campaign received millions of dollars from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. In Brazil, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a dozen years...

-Financial Express After presenting the Budget 2018, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley gave a name to government’s ambitious healthcare scheme Ayushmann Bharat: Modicare. He said that nobody knew whether Obamacare was successful but Modicare will become successful in every possible way. Dubbed as “world’s largest government-funded health care programme” aims to provide health insurance coverage of Rs 5 lakh per family per annum to 10 crore poor and vulnerable families. While the programme...

-PTI Bench issues notice to Union government on a plea against the project to track “digital media chatter from all core social media platforms” The Supreme Court on Friday took a strong note of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s decision to set up a social media hub for Monitoring online data, observing that it would be “like creating a surveillance state”. The court said the government wanted to tap citizens’ WhatsApp messages and...

-ThePrint.in The dip in forex reserves has been due to the intervention of the central bank to arrest the slide in the rupee. New Delhi: India’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen by about $2 billion per week for seven weeks now but top government officials said they were Monitoring the trend and there is no cause for alarm. Economic affairs secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said funds would be raised through foreign currency non-repatriable...