All school children across the country will soon have unique identification numbers (UID) which will help in tracking their movement in educational institutions and academic records. This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) here on Wednesday. The system will help in tracking students' mobility by creating an electronic registry, right from the primary level through...

Getting rural India to register for Aadhaar, the unique identification number scheme, is going to be a rewarding experience for banks. Leveraging on the government’s financial inclusion agenda, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has decided to pay Rs 50 per enrolment to banks and Life Insurance Corporation of India, which are acting as its registrars, for signing up residents till March 2011. Besides, any person who is below...

The Millennium Development declaration was a visionary document, which sought partnership between rich and poor nations to make globalisation a force for good. Its signatories agreed to explicit goals on a specific timeline. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for reducing hunger, poverty, infant and maternal mortality, for reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and giving children basic education by 2015. These also included gender equality,...

The government will have to invest around Rs 5 lakh crore to achieve its target of increasing the higher education enrolment rate from the current 14 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020, a think tank has estimated. The National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) has prepared a concept paper projecting the expected number of youths to be enrolled in higher and technical education by 2020 and the...

The Election Commission was the first to do it, and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has followed the example — the transgenders of India are finally being recognised by its government. Enrolment forms of the UIDAI will have a third column — ‘T’, for Transgender — along with the ‘M’ and ‘F’ for Male and Female respectively, so that over a million eunuchs can register their unique identities. The EC...