-The United Nations   The United Nations launched today an information system to improve and expand the exchange of weather, climate and water data, which can be used for disaster risk reduction, water management, food security and health purposes.   The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Information System will facilitate access to meteorological observations and products, making it easy to share them with a wide variety of stakeholders. According to WMO, this will translate into free...

-The Business Standard   Its guarantee of non-duplication can have far-reaching cost benefits but it has deep design flaws that can be compromised. PRAVEEN CHAKRAVARTY Former Volunteer, Financial Inclusion, UIDAI* “Aadhaar is an unadulterated identity programme that answers the question: Is the individual who he or she claims to be?”   The word “unique”, and not “identity”, is central to the unique identity programme or Aadhaar. It may be true that the vast majority of people possess some...

-The Hindu   Suggest “necessary preventive” measures to safeguard the interest of workers   Trade union groups on Monday pitched for a worker-oriented Budget for 2012-13 aimed at removing poverty and unemployment and suggested “necessary preventive” measures to safeguard the interests of workers. At their meeting here with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee — the second in the series of the customary pre-Budget consultations — representatives of trade unions (TUs) proposed that wages of contract labour...

The Aditya Birla Group increased its contribution to political parties about fourfold to Rs 30.5 crore in 2009-10 while the Bharti Group cut it from Rs 17 crore to zero.  The two main national parties, Congress and BJP, received Rs 84 crore and Rs 82 crore, respectively, as contribution from all sources while a regional party like Sharad Pawar's NCP obtained only Rs 3 crore.  The 2009-10 numbers of companies making legal...

-The Hoot The brutally fatal silencing of three journalists along with the sharp rise in censorship of content in online media and the increasing cases of defamation marked the deterioration of the climate for free speech across India in 2011. Attacks on journalists continued to be high, with 24 recorded instances even as writers, journalists and lawyers bore the brunt of the intolerance of vigilante groups to dissenting opinion. The Free Speech...