-Livemint.com With banks and ATMs under water, people were able to draw cash from Aadhaar-enabled micro-ATMs New Delhi: When heavy rains marooned large parts of Tamil Nadu, banking correspondents (BC) armed with Aadhaar-enabled micro-ATMs fanned out to help people retrieve cash from their bank accounts. The flood swept away many belongings including the bank pass book, debit card and other identification documents of S. Sangeetha, 28, who lives in Anumandai village in...

-Livemint.com What’s essential for the unique identification number to continue is a strong law. But what should it look like? A key thrust of the 2012 writ petition filed in the Aadhaar case (Puttaswamy versus Union of India) was that the executive action in implementing Aadhaar was unconstitutional in the absence of a law. Later developments in the case, including the government’s argument that there is no fundamental right to privacy, and...

-Scroll.in   An audit of ration shops after the introduction of Aadhaar revealed that many genuine beneficiaries couldn’t collect food grain due to system glitches. The Modi government’s insistence on the use of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, to weed out “ghosts, fakes, duplicates” from social welfare schemes is counterproductively excluding genuine beneficiaries from the programmes. In Andhra Pradesh, an official audit conducted after ration shops adopted the Aadhaar system revealed that many...

-Livemint.com Move to train 10,000 youths aimed at maintaining quality of assets created under rural jobs scheme New Delhi: The ministry of rural development is planning to train at least 10,000 youths in basic civil engineering concepts and engage them in the planning and supervision of works carried out under the ministry’s flagship welfare programme—the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), according to ministry officials who did not want...

-Business Standard After outsourcing primary health care and diagnostic services to private entities, the state plans universal health insurance scheme for treatment at private hospitals The Rajasthan government has decided to provide health insurance to the 70 million residents in the state. The move comes after the government's decision to outsource primary health centres and specialised diagnostic services to private players on Public-Private Partnership (PPP) mode. The Swasthya Bima Yojana scheme is provided...