-Livemint.com * Trying to project lower interest rates as a panacea for everything isn’t the right way to go about it. The central government just played an April Fool’s joke on a large section of India’s middle class, which invests in small savings schemes. Late Wednesday evening, the government announced a substantial cut in interest rates on small savings schemes for the three months to June. The interest rates on Senior Citizen Savings Scheme...

-The Hindu This is the first time that the Centre has scrapped the notified interest rates on small savings schemes after switching to a quarterly interest rate setting system in April 2016. Hours after notifying significant cuts in small savings instruments’ returns for this quarter, the government has backtracked on these sharp cuts. This is the first time that the Centre has scrapped the notified interest rates on small savings schemes after...

-The Indian Express Through this month, regional provident fund offices have been sending out queries in a specified format to companies seeking “employment data of the proportion of SC & ST employees in total employment”. THE MINISTRY of Labour and Employment has kicked off a survey that requires establishments contributing to the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), including from the private sector, to furnish information on the number of SC and...

-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC)  resigned allegedly...

-The Hindu There needs to be robust infrastructure for official statistics so that governments do not suppress inconvenient truths Over the past two weeks, headlines have focussed on declining employment between 2011-12 and 2016-17; loss of jobs under the National Democratic Alliance government, particularly post-demonetisation; and the government’s refusal to release a report using the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) documenting this decline, leading to resignations of two members of the National...