-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The government, in a bind over a recent Supreme Court order asking it to desist from linking Social welfare schemes with its ambitious unique identity card Aadhaar, on Monday held out an assurance to the top court that no one would be deprived of any Social welfare benefits for not holding Aadhaar. The government said while it had initiated the scheme to provide benefit transfers using Aadhaar...

-The Hindustan Times In many ways, they are the nowhere people. Now a Unesco report Social Inclusion of Internal Migrants in India puts the number of internal migrants at around a third of the population. This number is far higher than the number of migrants who leave India to work abroad. Yet, since most internal migrants move back and forth according to where they can find work, they get left out...

-PTI Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has joined government and PSU oil firms against the Supreme Court order making Aadhaar card not mandatory for availing social benefits saying, its directive has "very serious implications" in the implementation of welfare schemes. The UIDAI also contended that its order dated September 23, putting the onus on it to check that Aadhaar card should not be given to illegal immigrants, impinges on the jurisdiction...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...

-The Times of India Put 50% cap on all reservations Affirmative action can work only in limited doses. It should not be used as a sledgehammer that rules out all other criteria of job selection. The 50% cap on reservations mandated by the Supreme Court earlier should be the absolute upper limit for all categories of reservations. Any relaxation of this upper limit would further dilute meritocracy in public services, impede good...