-Live Mint The news that a parliamentary committee has rejected its proposed Bill must come as a jolt to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Reports say that the committee was concerned about duplication with the National Population Register (NPR), the technology, Data Protection, and the cost. This comes closely on the heels of the home ministry’s contention that UIDAI does not meet the “degree of assurance” required for NPR,...

Disability is widely recognized as a cross cutting developmental issue that has relevance to all dimensions of social exclusion. Even today, if we link up disability to developmental issues, it raises serious concerns where people with disabilities are at a double burden of marginalization. Disability has been seen as both the reason for and the consequence of poverty. Trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty, people with disabilities are denied...

The 11th five-year plan promised the nation “inclusive growth”. It marked a departure from the earlier official position that the “benefits of growth” would automatically “trickle down” to the poor, and that if growth was not actually benefiting the poor, then the reason lay in its not being high enough. The 11th plan, by contrast, conceded that the “benefits of growth” did not automatically “trickle down”, but argued that growth...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

Despite 60 years of Constitutional guarantees and two decades after the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, India's children still continue to face grave violation of their basic rights, an independent social audit has revealed. “We do not have a National Policy for Children defining the ‘child'. In fact, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has time and again recommended that a...