-The Indian Express The Authority termed allegations of “surveillance and violation of privacy rights” as “totally misplaced”. Trying to allay fears about its plans to hire a social media agency to gauge public sentiments on Aadhaar in the social media, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has told the Supreme Court that the proposed agency will only look at publicly available information on Aadhaar, and will have no access to private...

-The Hindu Environment Ministry and inland waterways body differed on need for clearances India’s longest waterway project, one terminal of which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this week, was made possible only after a high-power Committee of Ministers and senior officials from multiple Ministries overruled the recommendations of experts appointed by the Environment Ministry. The latter had recommended public consultations and a full-fledged environment clearance, documents made available through...

-Newsclick.in Of the 136 talukas in Maharashtra, which had demanded that they should be declared ‘drought-hit’, only three were “eligible” to be there in the category, as per 2016 manual. Though the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had declared a month ago that as many as 255 districts of the country have witnessed deficit rainfall of 20 to 59 per cent during the South-West monsoon, many of the states are yet to declare...

For long, economists have argued among themselves whether income should be the only criterion for measuring poverty. After all, in real life a person can face multiple deprivations, say, in terms of access to education, health and living standards, among others. The multidimensional poverty index (MPI), which offers a valuable complement to traditional income-based poverty measures, was first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). The MPI looks at...

-ThePrint.in India’s rights watchdog NHRC — labelled ‘toothless tiger’ — is swamped with cases but has little resources to address them. This, despite an ‘A’ rating from UN body. New Delhi: On paper, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which turned 25 last week, is a success story. In February, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), a UN body based in Geneva, re-accredited India’s apex rights watchdog with the ‘A’...