-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...

-BBC French economist Thomas Piketty says there is still a "huge" gap in data about income tax in India. Official figures just released show only 1% of Indians paid tax in 2013, while 2% filed a tax return. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that publishing the data was a "big step towards transparency and informed policy-making". But Mr Piketty told the BBC the data was too thin to draw significant conclusions about levels of...

-The Hindu Business Line Ten years on, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act endures because it provides the poor a political voice February 2016 marks a decade since India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) came into force. NREGA is both revolutionary and modest; it promises every rural household one hundred days of employment annually on public-works projects, but the labour is taxing and pays minimum wage, at best. Many charges have...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...

-Frontline.in   The Modi government has apparently realised that the private sector is not up to the task of driving growth. It hopes to fund its neoliberal dream of India becoming the fastest-growing emerging market through a combination of off-Budget borrowing and drastic expenditure reduction in key social sectors. IT will soon be a year since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office at the Centre....