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BHOPAL: The Madhya Pradesh government has started the process of receiving applications for farm loan waiver and Chief Minister Kamal Nath says that by the end of February the amount of loan waiver up to Rs. 2 lakh will be deposited in the accounts of eligible farmers.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: He came. He saw. But he failed to conquer. That broadly sums up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Kerala, despite the claims by state BJP leaders to the contrary.

LUCKNOW: Snubbed by SP-BSP alliance leaders Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, Congress is preparing to contest all the 80 Lok Sabha seats with the cooperation of smaller parties. And this means that UP is set to witness a three-cornered contest involving three alliances.

“It came by the Kollam Bypass,” the man on the telephone whispered. “It’s very confidential. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been awarded the first-ever Philip Kotler Presidential Award. Don’t spread the word to all his Mitron just yet. It came down to the wire, the selection you know.”

NEW DELHI: The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India has extended its full support and solidarity to the three-day strike from 23rd January to 25th January 2019 called jointly by the three Defence Civilian Employees Federations representing four lakh defence civilian employees working in ordnance factories, research units, naval dockyards, workshops and depots under Army, Navy and Air Force and also the Military Engineer Services.

It was disconcerting to see a Minister of Uttar Pradesh Government claim that the law and order situation in the State had improved after the Adityanath government took over. The statement, coming a couple of days after the brutal killing of a policeman in Gazipur by an unruly mob, is bizarre and shameful, especially considering that this is the second murder of a policeman in the State within one month. The Director General UP Police also has similarly claimed improvement in crime situation in the state in 2018 over 2017.

Education. Lack of skills. Jobs. Unemployment. Start thinking of these and the picture of a banana republic emerges. How much does India allocate for education? Compared to developed countries, hardly enough to cover the population. The US Department of Education got discretionary funding of $70.7 billion in 2016, an increase of 4% over the previous year. Spending on education in India was 2.7% of GDP for financial year 2018. Compared to peers, India spends the least on education.

Come January, rent-seeking starts from various pressure groups for tax sops and other concessions in the budget and it is always a tight rope walk for any finance minister as lobbyists, industrialists, agriculturists, exporters and so on seek relief but none will advice the government on how to mop up additional resources for various social infrastructural schemes, which are equally important.

The Narendra Modi government has saved the French company Dassault from a serious financial crisis in 2016 by giving orders for 36 Rafale jets at the cost of sacrificing the viability of its own public sector enterprise Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd(HAL) by denying its offset partnership, according to the American publication Defence News.

The price of a vote is estimated at € 6 for the legislative elections, and € 32 for the municipal polls in France, according to a working paper ‘The Price of a Vote: Evidence from France 1993-2014’, scheduled to be published in February 2019 and, authored by Julia Cagé, associate professor of economics, Sciences Po Paris, and Yasmine Bekkoiche Ph.D. student at the Paris School of Economics. “Simulations show that small changes in spending patterns and caps can have a large impact on electoral outcomes and seats. Our results suggest that political finance needs to be tightly regulated”, they cautioned. Indeed, money in politics is no more ‘a strictly American phenomenon. In France, despite strong campaign finance laws, campaign donations have a direct influence on legislative and municipal election results”, the authors state.