'Some of the flagship employment generation and placement schemes, such as the PM’s Employment Generation Programme and Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission, are expected to see a sharp decline in job creation during the current fiscal, according to data tabled in Parliament...'
'The Centre is planning to splurge over ₹100 crore to host the US President Donald Trump in his first visit to India on February 24. In his two-day tour starting on February 24, Trump will spend around three hours in Ahmedabad for which Ahmedabad authorities will spend ₹80 to ₹85 crore to beautify the city, Reuters reported...'
'More than 17 crore PAN cards will become inoperative if not linked with the Aadhaar by end of March. In a move with large scale disruption potential, the Income Tax Department has said that Permanent Account Number (PAN) will become inoperative if not linked with Aadhaar by March 31, 2020. It may be recalled that the deadline for linking of PAN and Aadhaar has been extended several times and the latest deadline ends on 31 March, 2020...'
'...But last week the NRC data suddenly became inaccessible. The contract to manage the data processing was given to Indian information-technology giant Wipro. As news spread about the “data loss”, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a clarification that “there is a technical issue regarding visibility on Cloud”. The NRC website is hosted in the URL http://nrcassam.nic.in/ on a domain which is under the National Informatics Center, a Government of India entity.
'...Palhe is one of 565 mostly-uneducated women from six blocks in five Chhattisgarh districts who find themselves alienated as beneficiaries under a scheme that seeks to benefit them the most. The Chhattisgarh government has paid scant attention to an ever-increasing pile of pending applications under PMMVY even as it declared December 2-8, 2019, as maternity week to increase the enrollment of first-time nursing mothers under the scheme.
'Call it the vanishing-toilet scam. More than 4.5 lakh Swachh loos have been flushed into oblivion in Madhya Pradesh, along with the Rs 540 crore it took to build them.
The toilets may never be found — though the administration has GPS-tagged photographs of each of them — but the government aims to recover every paisa spent on them. It’s a reminder of the toilet door scam unearthed in Guna district in 2017, where the iron doors of 42,000 toilets were built 10kg lighter, leading to siphoning of crores...'
'"The used or printed VVPAT slips in any election... shall be retained for one year and shall thereafter be destroyed,” says Rule 94 (b) of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961. But The Quint has found that the Election Commission of India has already destroyed the printed VVPAT slips used in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. And that too, only four months after the results were announced in May 2019... Remember, when we vote, the VVPAT slip verifies if our vote has gone to the candidate of our choice.
'After receiving temporary bans from four airlines for heckling television news anchor Arnab Goswami on a IndiGo flight, stand-up comic Kunal Kamra Wednesday said it was “not shocking” that the airlines took action against him for exercising his “right to speech”. On Tuesday, Kamra shared a video which showed him accosting Goswami onboard an IndiGo flight. Hours later, IndiGo and Air India suspended him for his “unacceptable behaviour” based on Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s advisory.
'The Ministry of Law and Justice signed off on the Narendra Modi government’s decision to hastily pass the controversial electoral bond scheme by bypassing the Rajya Sabha, despite putting on record that the government’s strategy was illegal and unconstitutional, documents obtained by HuffPost India establish. In a two-page note, the law ministry said this illegal step was a one-off exception and urged the Modi government to “avoid considering this practice as a precedent”, the documents reviewed by HuffPost India show.
'A ~2,000-crore fund to set up a chain of modern markets for farmers, announced in the Union Budget 2018-19, has largely gone unspent in what experts see as a sign of how overregulated agricultural markets have kept farmers chained to outdated policies. These markets, essentially village-level bazaars, were meant to act as aggregation points for farm produce, where farmers and traders could transact freely with minimal rules. The aim was to provide an alternative to existing supply chains that are rigged by middlemen and, as a result, drive down farmers’ share of profits.
