-The Times of India Try booking a tatkal train ticket online at 8am when booking counters and the web portal open simultaneously, and you will invariably find the website hanging frequently. Do not expect the situation to improve dramatically as IRCTC, the agency that runs the site, has plainly said it cannot meet the surging demand. A GM-level IRCTC official said there were simply too many users, especially ahead of festivals and...
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UID: Are your biometric I-cards stacked against you?-M Rajshekhar
-The Economic Times Imagine a rural family of five. Mom. Dad. Two kids. And Grandma. Assume too that they are below the poverty line. The day is coming when this family will have to give its biometrics out to myriad agencies. You know that Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or the Registrar General's National Population Register (NPR) has been collecting biometrics for a while now. But a set of other...
More »Why It’s So Hard to Fix Land Acquisition-Tripti Lahiri
India Inc. was aghast at the recent report of a parliamentary committee that recommended that a new draft land acquisition law limit occasions when the government may intervene to acquire land for use by private firms. But in a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly last month, Delhi University economics professor Ram Singh laid out data that supports the committee’s recommendations. Mr. Singh argues that government-driven land acquisition is generally...
More »Unique identity crisis-Latha Jishnu, Jyotika Sood
-Down to Earth Biometric-based unique identity or Aadhaar is leading to huge problems for people working for the rural employment guarantee scheme and for others receiving welfare benefits. Not only have enrolments been done shoddily but the experience of the pilot projects shows that it is almost impossible to authenticate the work-hardened fingerprints of the poor, find Latha Jishnu and Jyotika Sood. Besides, there is the overwhelming issue of deficient online...
More »Practise what you preach-Pranesh Prakash
The only way to fix the IT laws is to change the way they are made Laws in India relating to the internet are greatly flawed. The only way to fix them would be to fix the way they are made. The Cyber-Laws and E-Security Group in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT, ‘DeitY’ according to their website) has proved incapable of making balanced, informed laws and policies. The...
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