-The Hindu The affidavit goes against the 2011 recommendation of National Commission for Scheduled Castes With the Supreme Court awaiting the Union government’s present position on including Dalit Christians as members of Scheduled Castes (SCs), the Narendra Modi government’s latest standing on this aspect has been to reject any such proposition, according to an affidavit filed by the government in November 2019, which also said Dalits who converted to Buddhism could not...

-Scroll.in The research also showed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supporters were more likely to trust news on the messaging app than those critical of him The majority of Indian citizens trust news that they receive on WhatsApp, a study released on Thursday by the Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found. The study analysed responses of citizens in India, Brazil, the United Kingdom and United States on questions about...

-The Telegraph The ambit of the corpus created to fight public health emergencies widened but its veil stays intact The veil on the PM Cares Fund — the corpus created to battle the Covid-19 crisis without the tiresome need for any audit scrutiny — remained firmly in place even as its newly-appointed trustees decided on Wednesday to widen the scope of its operations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a virtual meeting of the...

-The Telegraph At present, India has 195 million households with ration cards (nearly 794 million people), lower than the beneficiaries we intended to target in 2013 Inordinate delays in carrying out the census exercise are depriving millions of Indians who rely on rations for their subsistence. The exclusion of the poorest from the public distribution system in the pre and post-pandemic years was first flagged by the economists, Jean Drèze and Reetika...

-The Telegraph Experts say government measures facilitate supply of poor quality equipment and threaten to hobble country’s research efforts The Narendra Modi government’s Make-in-India campaign and e-marketplace initiative have stirred frustration among scientists who say these measures facilitate the supply of poor quality equipment and threaten to hobble the country’s research efforts. The Make-in-India campaign embedded in the Government-e-marketplace (GeM), a portal for online procurement, appears to have ignored the realities of India’s...