-Hindustan Times The government’s decision to scrap high-value currency has sent wholesale vegetable prices crashing to rock-bottom levels, bringing misery to millions of farmers hoping for good returns for their produce after two successive drought years. Onions sold for just Re 1 per kilogram in wholesale markets at Madhya Pradesh’s Neemuch and Mandsaur this week while tomatoes cost less than Rs 2 per kg in Andhra Pradesh and Chandigarh. A kilogram of cauliflower...

-PTI ‘This exciting project will make South Asia’s rich and vibrant printed heritage accessible to everyone’ A new British Library project will digitise 4,000 early printed Bengali books, amounting to more than 800,000 pages, as part of the U.K. India Year of Culture plans for 2017. The digitisation project is part of a wider “Two Centuries of Indian Print” project, an international partnership led by the British Library with funding from the Newton...

-Scroll.in Panchayats have no funds to hire and pay hordes of workers forced to return home from cities. Demonetisation has exposed the fragile state of the government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. In Uttar Pradesh, in particular, an ever-burgeoning army of migrant labourers returning to their villages for lack of work in the cities, as a direct result of the cash crisis, has led to a mad scramble for employment...

-The Indian Express With optic fibre cables laid in over 65,000 gram panchayats, Centre’s BharatNet project seems on track to achieve its 1,00,000 target by March 2017. However, lack of active connectivity remains a concern. Ahmedabad/ Gandhinagar/ New Delhi: With less than 25 per cent of the 65,475 gram panchayats in the country with optic fibre connectivity having active internet under the BharatNet project, the success of Centre’s push for digital payments...

-Caravan Magazine On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an announcement declaring that notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 would not be legal tender as a part of his government’s policy to clamp down on counterfeiting and black money. It has been widely reported that this policy would directly impact the real-estate sector, which typically witnesses a significant amount of transactions that are made through cash to avoid...