-The Hindu NABARD to manage Rs. 77,000-cr. corpus for scheme. India’s apex rural-development bank will manage a Rs. 77,000-crore corpus as part of a Central government push to complete 99 unfinished irrigation projects across the country by 2019, and bring water to 76.03 lakh hectares. The contours of the scheme were first made public by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech this February and involve finishing 149 projects overdue since...

-The Hindu Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh announces it will not take part in the strike. The Left affiliated central trade unions will go ahead with a nationwide strike on Friday, even as the Centre on Tuesday announced sops in a bid to placate them. The peace offering includes a hike in the minimum wage for unskilled non-agricultural workers in central public sector units from Rs. 246 to Rs. 350 a day and formation of...

-The Hindu It has long been argued that government spending on health should increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP. National Health Accounts (NHA) monitors the flow of resources in a country’s health system and provides detailed data on health finances. The NHA estimates for India for the financial year 2013-14 were published earlier this week, after a long void of almost a decade. The previous estimates were for the year 2004-05. In...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: An inter-ministerial panel is likely to discuss on Tuesday a draft bill prepared by the consumer affairs ministry which seeks to punish celebrities who endorse products that are substandard or make misleading claims. The stringent provisions in the bill include a fine of Rs 10 lakh and jail of up to two years for a first offence by celebrities. For subsequent offences, the draft bill provides a fine...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...