-The Indian Express The SC directive that Aadhaar can’t be made mandatory for any service — which the government can’t oppose until Aadhaar gets legal validity — has complicated the issue. On January 1, 2013, the Congress-led UPA government launched the Direct Benefits Transfer scheme, centred around the Aadhaar project begun a few years earlier. Teething troubles and implementation bottlenecks followed, the interest of the outgoing dispensation waned, and both Aadhaar...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com Dehradun: Maletha village in Tehri Garhwal is very angry. Men, women and children sit on the road in dharna, demanding that a stone crushing company grandly called Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram be evicted from their village. The villagers’ problems began in February 2014 when two stone crushers arrived in Maletha with their machines. Their operations created an ear-splitting noise and belched clouds of dust that settled on crops and orchards. In August, another...

It is difficult for a person to get aadhaar card/number if s/he does not have pre-existing proofs of identity and address. It has been revealed from a reply to RTI application that only 2.19 lakh aadhaar numbers have been issued to people who did not have any other prior identity proof, which is just 0.03% of total aadhaar numbers generated so far. The RTI reply dated 28 April, 2015 by the Unique...

-Down to Earth Kashmir's handmade pashmina shawls have long been threatened by power looms outside the state. The problem has now spread within KASHMIR'S FABLED handcrafted pashmina shawls could soon be a thing of the past. The proliferation of machine-made pashmina products has become a big threat to the livelihood of the state’s artisans who have been spinning and weaving pashmina for ages. According to the Jammu and Kashmir handicraft department, the...

-The Times of India A bunch of concerned doctors and members of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) have written a letter demanding an explanation from the IMA for its decision to 'validate' Kent water purifiers. The slew of advertisements released by Kent, in which it has prominently claimed that its products were 'validated', 'approved' or 'accepted' by IMA has led to a slug fest, especially in the online world, between groups...