-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government cleared the decks for a fully paper trail-based parliamentary poll on Wednesday, with the Union Cabinet approving release of funds to the Election Commission for procuring 16.15 lakh voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) units in time for the 2019 general election. The expenditure of Rs 3,173 crore on the VVPATs will be split over two financial years, 2017-18 and 2018-19. If the EC...
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Bezwada Wilson, national president of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, interviewed by Akshay Deshmane (Frontline.in)
-Frontline.in Magsaysay Award winning activist and national president of the Safai Karmachari Andolan Bezwada Wilson is a co-petitioner with Major General (Retd) S.G. Vombatkere in a Supreme Court case relating to the Aadhaar project. He raises an important concern about the impact of Aadhaar on people born into oppressed castes, particularly safai karmacharis, or manual scavengers. Excerpts from an interview he gave Frontline: * What is your opinion on Aadhaar? There is no...
More »Blundering along, dangerously -Usha Ramanathan
-Frontline.in The Aadhaar project’s headlong push towards “total” enrolment of Indian citizens threatens the privacy of individuals on an unprecedented scale, while its patchy biometric system acts as a tool of denial for the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, the UID chugs along, regardless, fuelled by the avarice of private interests who seek to cash in on citizen data. IN the last seven years, the right to privacy of Indian citizens has been...
More »Armed With a Toothless Law, the Plight of the Adivasi Worsens -Abhijit Mohanty
-TheWire.in Since coming into effect 21 years ago, PESA has been grossly misused and underutilised, disenfranchising Adivasi communities all over the country. In India, tribal communities have had a long history of struggle, including during the colonial rule. In fact, the tribal war for independence has largely been ignored in the popular history of independent India. Today, most of us are not aware that the war of independence started as early as...
More »Note ban hit not just poor, but manufacturing sector too: House panel -Abantika Ghosh
-The Indian Express When announcing the decision on November 8, the government had said the then Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would cease to be legal tender and this would cleanse the system of black money. A Parliamentary panel has come down heavily on demonetisation, describing it as one that not just inconvenienced the poor but also affected the manufacturing sector. “It was an effort to combat corruption, tax evasion and...
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