-Newsclick.in The tragedy of unemployment continues, complemented by a government that has no solution except to fiddle with data. If there was one defining promise by Narendra Modi in the run-up to the 2014 General Elections, it was that he would give one crore jobs every year. Nearly five years down the line, this is what promises to sink him and his government at the Centre. Far from fulfilling this promise, the Modi...

-Livemint.com Some perspectives on the issue seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons There is much discourse on both the issue of agrarian distress and farmer suicides. However, there have been some arguments that seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons—that the people who committed suicide just happened to be farmers; that they were not poor; that (as argued by Shamika Ravi of Brookings India) the...

-India Today The ECI plan to link voter IDs to Aadhaar risks a repeat exclusion of voters, and thus falling afoul of the SC order that forbids denial of service. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is reportedly making renewed efforts to link citizen voter IDs to Aadhaar-the UIDAI's contentious biometric ID, whose creeping overreach was halted by the Supreme Court in September this year. A previous linking effort in 2015, under...

-Down to Earth The scheme's Management Information System destroys local accountability, promotes centralisation and administrative control and gives out wrong data There is an increasing tendency in the Union government to show performances of central schemes, especially social welfare programmes, through data captured by the Management Information System (MIS). It is indeed a matter of astonishment how the MIS Data always shows high performances of schemes and programmes, while ground surveys and...

-Newsclick.in Funding is not keeping pace with demand, and delays or vanished dues are discouraging job seekers in these times of extreme rural distress. Here is a little known but chilling fact about the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGS: between April and mid-December this year, about 1.28 crore people who demanded jobs were turned back. This refusal to give work has been happening every year but it has increased after the Modi...