-NDTV.com The Madhya Pradesh Accountant General found large-scale fraud and irregularities in the ambitious free food scheme for girls and women. Bhopal: From ration transport trucks that were found to be motorcycles to wild exaggeration of the number of beneficiaries, the Madhya Pradesh government's nutrition programme for children has been nobbled by eye-popping levels of corruption, at the risk of leaving them malnourished and costing taxpayers crores of rupees, the state's own...

-Business Standard Social security scheme should reach the poor and underprivileged, says official The Centre will bar income taxpayers from availing themselves of the Atal Pension Yojana (APY) from October 1 this year to ensure that the scheme’s benefits reach the poor and underprivileged. Atal Pension Yojana, launched in 2015, is a social security scheme for citizens aged 18 to 40. Subscribers, based on their contributions, get a guaranteed monthly pension of Rs...

-The Hindu It would be much easier for the government to provide relief to people if the tax base was wider, says Revenue Secretary Tarun Bajaj, noting that four crore people don’t file returns though the tax department gets some TDS collections on their account. With major customs duty rationalisation done and corporate tax settled, the government hopes to finish some pending reforms in personal income tax and GST, creating a...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...

-The Indian Express While the total taxpayer base grew at an average rate of about 7.9 per cent a year, individual taxpayers recorded an average annual growth rate of 8.2 per cent in these five years, inching up from 94 per cent in AY 2011-12 to 94.9 per cent in AY 2016-17, according to official data. New Delhi: Even as the country’s total taxpayer base increased to 6.41 crore in assessment year...