-Down to Earth Jean Dreze on why he prefers a solidarity society, rather than a welfare state * Are you actually an advocate of the welfare state? Ideally, I would prefer to think in terms of a solidarity society rather than welfare state, for two reasons. First, private non-profit institutions can play a very useful role in the social sector. In many countries, some of the best schools and health centres are run...

-The Indian Express In Jharkhand, ABBA was first made compulsory for PDS users in Ranchi district in August 2016. By June 2017, it was mandatory in about 80 per cent of the Ration shops across the state. This meant, of course, that Aadhaar itself was compulsory — no Aadhaar, no food. Recent events in Jharkhand shed some useful light on the damage done by compulsory biometric authentication in the Public Distribution...

-Hindustan Times While Delhi came under flak for running fewer buses than that it did three years ago and therefore failing to enforce blanket road Rationing, compliance of even basic anti-pollution measures was impossible in the NCR because of poor infrastructure. The Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) mandated by the Supreme Court to counter air pollution was meant to be an effort in regional coopeRation. The entire National Capital Region (NCR), which...

-Scroll.in The husband said the store refused to give them foodgrains as Shakina, who was too ill to step out, was not present for biometric identification The family of a 50-year-old woman from Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly claimed she died of starvation on Tuesday because they were denied their monthly quota of cheaper foodgrains as she could not be present at the Ration shop for biometric identification, NDTV reported on Wednesday. The district administRation,...

-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...