-Counterview.net Calling the 2018-19 Union budget "highly disappointing", the top advocacy group, Right to Food Campaign (RFC), in a comprehensive analysis, has said, it has "miserably failed to respond to the present situation of rural distress and mass unemployment", adding, "Despite a spate of starvation deaths in different parts of the country, the budget makes no mention of hunger or malnutrition." Thus, RFC says, "There was some hope that the budget would...

-The Telegraph Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): Many a fear has been expressed over the potential misuse of the Aadhaar card, ranging from privacy violation to online looting to suppression of dissent. Now, a headmaster in Uttar Pradesh has been accused of opening an unforeseen flank by showing the door to 17 pupils on the pretext that they hadn't submitted their Aadhaar numbers. Rajesh Kumar, the headmaster of the government-run Laltapur Primary School in Chandauli...

-The Indian Express Behind dumping of potatoes, including outside Assembly, a bumper crop and insufficient storage space. Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh, the largest potato producing state with about 35% of the country’s total output, has had a bumper crop in 2016-17 — over 155 lakh tonnes — with the result that potatoes are rotting along roadsides and outside cold storage units. What threw the spotlight on the surplus — apparently more than the government...

-The Hindu Business Line Akshaya Patra launches pilots with millet-based menu in Karnataka, Telangana Bengaluru: Nutrient-rich millets such as jowar, foxtail and pearl millets, considered as smart foods, are being introduced in the mid-day meal schemes in Karnataka and Telangana by the The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF) on a pilot basis. The move is aimed at enhancing the nutritional intake of the students of the government and aided schools, besides benefiting the growers. Students...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...