/
•
•
Context is everything.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
Detailed stories on technology startups, business and economic current affairs.
A glitch-prone digital attendance system and mandatory Aadhaar-linked bank accounts to receive wages have hit the very people the rural jobs scheme was meant to benefit.
Editor's note: On 15 March, Vinita Tigga sat with her infant daughter in her lap at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Even as she tried to soothe her child, the 35-year-old looked tired, weary from the more-than-1,000 km train journey that she took from her village in Jharkhand, along with at least 50 other workers, mostly women, to arrive in the national capital. Tigga has a pressing reason to be at the famous protest site. In December, she was compelled to quit work under the Indian government’s rural jobs programme, or MNREGA, after struggling too long to get regular wages because of glitches in a recently introduced app that allows workers to log their attendance. “It is problematic for all of us. If we are unable to mark our attendance, how are we supposed to get the wages?” says Tigga, who recently took up working at a construction site for a private hospital, a job that pays Rs 250 a week. “I have not received the payment [from the government] for the last two years, except for one time in 2022 when Rs 6,000 …
India’s leading tech hardware distribution company is making the most of the unprecedented rise in global prices of laptops and other tech hardware. There’s just one problem.
How well rural consumption is doing is subjective. What isn’t subjective is how growing indebtedness, combined with stagnant income growth, is creating a tinderbox for households, banks and consumer companies that no one is talking about.
Even though the government of India did a U-turn on the mandatory pre-installation of the anti-fraud app on all mobile phones sold or imported in the country, the larger problem of petty cybercrime remains grim.
