-The Hindustan Times We must thank the Supreme Court for doing what the Centre should have done in the first place: clearing the confusion on whether Aadhaar is mandatory for citizens to avail of State subsidies by ruling, on Monday, that it is not. It must be mentioned here that even though personal information of citizens is being collated by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for Aadhaar, the authority has...

-The Hindu Per capita entitlements under the food security bill will not cover beneficiaries as comprehensively as household entitlements The government hopes to secure in this session of Parliament, approval for the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) so that it can replace the food security ordinance. The NFSB, on which the ordinance is based, guarantees supplementary nutrition services through anganwadis for all children under six, midday meals for schoolchildren, and, very importantly, maternity...

-The Hindustan Times A couple of months ago, I was in South Block for a meeting at the ministry of defence. Security norms dictate leaving mobile and electronic devices at the checkpoint. Imagine my horror when I came back an hour later to see one of the guards going through my iPad. This cavalier attitude towards individual privacy is illustrative of an interesting dilemma between the inevitability of a more intrusive...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Children on the streets of Delhi can now get a unique identity through the UID-Aadhaar programme. The state government's women and child development department has asked NGOs to support the process of enrollment for the Biometrics-based identity number that will enable access to social entitlements. After it received a communication from the Unique Identification Authority of India in February regarding enrollment for UID cards for...

-The Economic Times In the race to give each Indian a unique identity number, the government's National Population Register (NPR) project is being steadily outpaced by Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar project, buttressing a commonly-held notion that a corporate style-run operation is more efficient than a government-run scheme even when both do the same task deploying the same technique. A Home Ministry's assessment of both the projects shows that as on March 31, 2013,...