-The Hindu It has drafted a detailed plan for 2016-17 with different themes. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government will mark its second anniversary with all the Ministries taking mass pledges on the Swachh Bharat portal on May 26 this year. In a bid to make Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project Swachh Bharat Mission a mass movement, the government has drafted a detailed plan for every day of 2016-17 with different themes...

-Outlook The structural basis is being laid out for future authoritarianism at the behest of foreign biometric and surveillance technology What distinguishes Barack Obama and David Cameron from Narendra Modi? Obama and Cameron oppose biometric identification but Modi supports it. On 11 May 2005 in the US, the Real ID Act for a national ID was rushed through US Congress and the US Senate with utmost urgency, a legacy of George Bush...

-Hindustan Times Ludhiana: Punjab finance minister Parminder Singh Dhindsa may have announced several perks for the agriculture sector, including provident funds for farmers, financial relief to families in which farmers committed suicides and medical insurance as part of the Budget 2016-17 for the state but several agricultural experts and farmers have pointed out all perks are futile without crop insurance. They stressed that if crop of farmers are not insured by the...

-People’s Democracy In the last week of February, a panel set up by the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body ruled against India on a complaint by the US in early 2013 that India’s Domestic Content Requirement (DCR) for some solar power projects violated WTO prohibitions on measures that result in “less favourable treatment” of international trade partners. The panel was ruling on an appeal by India in response to the original injunction...

-The Hindu The Aadhaar Bill opens the door to mass surveillance. This danger needs to be seen in the light of recent attacks on the right to dissent. No other country, and certainly no democratic country, has ever held its own citizens hostage to such a powerful infrastructure of surveillance. The Aadhaar project was sold to the public based on the claim that enrolment was “voluntary”. This basically meant that there was...