-CivilSocietyOnline.com Vikas Gando Thayo Chhe" which means ‘development has gone mad’ is a super hit song these days in Gujarat. In the just concluded garba festival, this song was hugely popular throughout Gujarat. The song became popular even before Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated his birthday on 7 September by declaring completion of an incomplete Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), heaping totally unnecessary, unjustified and unjust displacement on 40,000 families in the...

-Newsclick.in Crucial elements of the data on Jan Dhan Yojana have been removed from the government website. This gives rise to many questions. On 15 August 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) scheme with the claimed objective of nation-wide financial inclusion. In his speech, he stated that the initiative was aimed at eradicating ‘financial untouchability’ by opening at least one bank account per household in...

-Livemint.com While all of the post offices in India are supposed to have internet (and be digitized by the end of the year), internet connectivity is non-functional at several units Last month I read an interesting article about India’s postmen. It talked about the changing duties of postmen and the changing role of post offices. By the end of the article I was thinking of a scenario where our close to 2...

-The Indian Express Vasundhara Raje government will present The Code of Criminal Procedure (Rajasthan Amendment) Bill to replace the ordinance during this Assembly session. The Editors Guild of India has expressed “deep concern” about the Rajasthan Government’s decision to make the Criminal Laws (Rajasthan Amendment) Ordinance 2017 into an Act in the current legislative session. “(It) was ostensibly done to protect the judiciary and the bureaucracy against false FIRs. But in reality it...

-The Hindu Any aggressive attempt to widen the fiscal deficit will land India’s economy in problems The sharp deceleration in the growth of the economy as revealed by the first quarter estimate of GDP released a month ago has been widely commented upon. The policy prescriptions needed to reverse the trend depend on our understanding of the factors responsible for the slowdown. Among other things, one factor that stands out is the...