-Outlook The structural basis is being laid out for future authoritarianism at the behest of foreign biometric and surveillance technology What distinguishes Barack Obama and David Cameron from Narendra Modi? Obama and Cameron oppose biometric identification but Modi supports it. On 11 May 2005 in the US, the Real ID Act for a national ID was rushed through US Congress and the US Senate with utmost urgency, a legacy of George Bush...

-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-Kafila.org The last few months have seen an unusual public engagement around questions of secularism, freedom of speech, sedition and the like, with furious debates everywhere from our campuses, streets and TV studios to the floor of Parliament. The budget session has been enlivened by scenes of high drama, with the leading lights of the Treasury benches bringing colour, sound and fury to their tutorials on patriotism and nationalism. While these high-decibel...

-Livemint.com The government relies on for-profit big business to deliver public goods despite their inability to deliver Can we listen to the budget as an annual public statement by the government of its economic and social philosophy and intent? The centre abandoned five-year plans that earlier laid down a road map of where government policies are headed. The budget, then, is an important reality check of whether the government is literally...

-GovernanceNow.com   Jairam Ramesh questions Aadhaar’s role in plugging subsidy leakages    After snubbing the finance minister in Rajya Sabha, Jairam Ramesh of Congress questioned the government’s claim of saving Rs 14,000 crore by integrating Aadhaar for the LPG subsidy. Citing a report by International Institute of Sustainable Development, a London-based think tank, which seriously doubts the claim of savings accrued by DBT-LPG, Ramesh asked about the study on the basis of which...