-The New Indian Express BENGALURU: Sajida Begum, 65, has been living at the Leprosy Hospital on Magadi Road for the past 10 years. Her family left her at the hospital years ago and does not come to visit. This leprosy patient’s only sustenance is the Rs 1,000 pension that she gets every month. Three months ago, this was stopped for the lack of an Aadhaar card. Sajida has lost her fingers and...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expenditure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The UIDAI has provided some "relaxation" to banks in procurement of enrolment machines and hiring private data entry operators for their Aadhaar centres, and hopes that banks will offer such services at stipulated 10% of the branches "at the earliest", its CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey has said. The Aadhaar-issuing body, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has allowed banks to hire private data entry operators and enrolment machines and...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...