-Livemint.com Only Chhattisgarh and Odisha have shown extraordinary success in making public distribution system work efficiently and equitably Across thousands of schools in India, expensive computers, printers and scanners are gathering dust. In many panchayats and other local bodies, such hardwares remain unused. Meanwhile, tonnes of government orders and circulars continue to be scanned and uploaded on official websites, which serve absolutely no purpose to anyone. Computerization, digitization and automation are often seen...

-Business Standard Need open deliberation on systems to avoid misuse Now that a law is being put in place to validate the Aadhaar programme, the focus must shift to the rules which will be framed under it to work the system. It has to be ensured that these rules reflect the spirit and content of the new law. In scrutinising the rules, three primary issues will have to be kept in...

-Hindustan Times The government should pay 25% of wages of MGNREGA workers employed in individual farms and the poor should get an option to choose between money or subsidised food grains under the public distribution system (PDS). These are a few suggestions to be made by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog in the occasional paper that will be discussed with the states for framing a national policy to eliminate...

-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...