-Financial Express For sustainable growth, Rural India’s squeezing purchasing power needs immediate attention New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) unanimous call for a 25-basis-point rate hike after four years was PRImarily driven by the strengthening core inflation as well as the rising household inflationary expectations. Since the APRIl Monetary Policy Committee meeting, there have been some significant macro developments, mainly on four counts. First, the global crude oil PRIces have risen...

-The Hindu The GST’s faulty design has prevented the economy from benefiting fully from the indirect tax regime A year ago, at a special midnight session in Parliament, the launch of the goods and services tax (GST) was heralded as the new freedom. A year on, what has the GST achieved? ? One should not expect instant results. There will be many short comings when a complex reform is rolled out. But...

-The Hindu Income support must be provided to at least the most vulnerable farmers Our farm policy is so bad, the proverb ‘you reap what you sow’ isn’t true any longer. A bumper crop is no different from a drought, for it too depresses farm incomes. Good rains, excessive sowing and the bumper harvest last year produced gluts in the market that sent the PRIces of many crops, and therefore farm incomes, crashing....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A gang producing fake Aadhaar cards has been busted. Two men, who have been arrested, were former employees of a firm authorised to prepare Aadhaar cards at an SBI branch in Green Park. After losing their job early this year, Vikash Kumar and Sushil Kumar managed to slip out with the required equipment and started the fake operation in north Delhi’s Shastri Nagar. They were caught...

-Livemint.com According to Nafed, the central agency assigned to procure directly from farmers at government-set MSP, 6.34 million tonnes of pulses and oilseeds were purchased from about 3.5 million farmers till 22 June New Delhi: The central government procured a record Rs29,070 crore worth of pulses and oilseeds from farmers at minimum support PRIces (MSPs) in the 2017-18 crop season, arresting what could have been a sharper fall in wholesale PRIces. The procurement...