-The Hindu Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication does nothing in the battle against graft — there are better alternatives In a sickening way, October 2017 was like October 2002. Fifteen years ago, in Rajasthan’s Baran and Udaipur districts, there was a spate of starvation deaths. The government of the time made up fanciful stories to deny that the deaths had anything to do with hunger or government failure. In October 2017, the death of an 11-year-old...

-The Indian Express Cash transfers instead of food has been widely debated with several criticising it for not being an actual substitute for take-home rations, which is a mix of cereals, fats, sugar and pulses, with added micronutrients. In a major policy shift, the Ministry of Woman and Child Development (WCD) has prepared a proposal to substitute take-home rations, given in aanganwadis for infants under three and pregnant and lactating mothers,...

-The Indian Express We have been numbed by a series of lies, myths and fictions about the project. India is at risk of becoming a surveillance state, with faint resistance from libertarians, intellectuals, political parties, the media, or the Supreme Court. Very soon, almost everyone will have an Aadhaar number, seeded in hundreds of databases. Most of these databases will be accessible to the government without invoking any special powers. Permanent surveillance...

-IndiaSpend.com Kamla Devi (not her real name), of advanced but uncertain age, lives in Lohari, a remote adivasi village located inside a wildlife sanctuary in Udaipur, Rajasthan. On a summer day in 2016, we approached her as she was chasing after a small herd of goats, to ask questions as part of a study on the relation between ageing, paid work and pensions. Our very first question–whether she was a beneficiary of...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com New Delhi: The 100-day Accountability Yatra across Rajasthan led by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) has had an impact. The state government has issued orders to re-verify all one million pensions that had been stopped, including the 688,875 pensions that had been cancelled. From December 2015 to March this year the yatra had travelled to 33 districts in Rajasthan to assess how government schemes were functioning, find out people’s grievances...