When India embarked on its “unique ID” project in the fall of 2010, pledging to distribute unique 12-digit numbers to 1.2 billion people, the hope was that hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t have a passport, driver’s license or other credible identity document would get one – and with it, a ticket to essential government and private sector services. A new survey led by Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New...

This month a group of Dalit (or Untouchables, as they were formerly labelled) students organised a Beef Festival in Osmania University of Hyderabad. It was the festival to assert their culinary rights in public and make a political statement of dietary habits of Dalits and Muslims – by cooking and eating beef Biryani on campus. About 2000 students participated and although it started out well, the festival was disrupted and students...

While freedom of speech and expression is an individual right, its actualisation often relies on a vast infrastructure of intermediaries. In the offline world, this includes newspapers, television channels, public auditoriums, etc. It is often assumed that the internet has created a more robust public sphere of speech by doing away with many structural barriers to free speech. But the fact of the matter is that even if the internet enables...

Nagri (Ranchi), April 25: A piece of land is valued either Rs 1.55 lakh or Rs 340.5 crore. Take your pick. If you recover from this shock, you can proceed to figure out who should get in part or full 227.71 acres at Nagri, 15km from Ranchi. Construction of IIM-Ranchi and National University for Study and Research in Law (NUSRL) campuses has halted after villagers refused to budge from the acres,...

-The Telegraph An Indian pharmaceutical company has tweaked and tested a synthetic molecule first created in an American university and developed the world's latest drug against malaria, an alternative to standard anti-malarial therapy. India’s Ranbaxy Laboratories today launched the new drug for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, after nine years of research which was partly supported by the Indian government. Clinical trials in India, Tanzania, and Thailand...