-Economic and Political Weekly We support cash transfers such as old-age pensions, widow pensions, maternity entitlements and scholarships. However, we oppose the government’s plan for accelerated mass conversion of welfare schemes to Unique Identification Authority (UID)-driven cash transfers. This plan could cause havoc and massive social exclusion. We demand the following: (1) No replacement of food with cash under the public distribution system (PDS). (2) Immediate enactment of a comprehensive National Food Security...

-The Hindu The World Conference on International Telecommunication showed that countries are not yet ready to arrive at a consensus on regulation and control of the Internet The World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) that concluded on December 14 saw much heated debate. Some countries wanted to use the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to gain intergovernmental control of the World Wide Web. Some saw it as an opportunity to democratise the Internet,...

—AP Envoys from nearly 90 nations signed on Friday the first new U.N. telecommunications treaty since the Internet age, but the U.S. and other Western nations refused to join after claiming it endorses greater government control over cyberspace. The head of the U.N. telecoms group pushed back against U.S. assertions, defending the accord as necessary to help expand online services to poorer nations and add more voices to shape the direction of...

-Oxfam Blog As Oxfam’s two week online debate on the future of agriculture gets under way, John Ambler of Oxfam America imagines how it could all turn out right in the end. It is now 2050.  Globally, we are 9 billion strong.  Only 20% of us are directly involved in agriculture, and poor country economies have diversified.  Yet we all have enough food.  Technological innovation has played its part, but increased production...

-The Hindu It’s Russia, China, and Arab states versus E.U., U.S. and Japan; India is silent The December 3-14 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, could collapse if Russia does not back off from its proposal to bring the Internet under the control of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), thereby subjecting the web to inter-governmental regulation. At the conference’s plenary session, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kazakhstan backed the Russian proposal,...