-Scroll.in Supreme Court guidelines have made it clear beneficiaries cannot be denied access to welfare schemes even if they don’t have Aadhaar, activists say. An 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand’s Simdega district has died of starvation last fortnight, months after her family’s ration card was cancelled because it was not linked to their Aadhaar number, say Right to Food Campaign activists. With no school mid-day meals available during her Durga Puja holidays,...
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MGNREGA, once world's largest source of rural livelihood, now a tale of decay and digital delay -Rashme Sehgal
-Firstpost.com Have women living in rural India benefitted from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGA)? MNREGA was introduced in 2006 and has emerged as the largest programme in the world for providing employment to the rural poor. While there is no doubt that MNREGA in a short span of ten years did help generate 20 billion person-days of employment benefitting 276 million workers from which more than half were women....
More »Too good to be true: How MNREGA 'improvements' are actually costing workers their wages -Ankita Aggarwal
-Scroll.in Inability of local officials and infrastructure to cope with the complex technologies driving the scheme could be leaving lakhs of workers unpaid. This year’s Economic Survey lists several “improvements” in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act brought about since 2014-’15. Mostly, these “improvements” are technological initiatives – greater convergence with other programmes, “geo-tagging” of MNREGA assets. They have not made a difference on two of the stated purposes – timely...
More »All that data that Aadhaar captures -Jean Dreze
-The Hindu The very foundation of Aadhaar must be reconsidered in the light of the privacy judgment Predictably enough, the recent Supreme Court order affirming that privacy is a fundamental right sent Aadhaar’s public-relations machine into damage control mode. After denying the right to privacy for years, the government promptly changed gear and welcomed the judgment. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), suddenly asserted, “The Aadhaar...
More »Aadhaar rebels find ways to avoid PAN linkage -Namita Devidayal & Lubna Kably
-The Times of India MUMBAI: In a quiet display of dissent, numerous taxpayers across the country have opted to file their tax returns manually, via snail-mail, rather than get an Aadhaar card. Many others filed their returns online early, prior to June 30, when the Aadhaar linkage was not mandatory. "Technically you should be able to file online even if you don't have an Aadhaar card, but the e-filing system does not...
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