As the Prime Minister hands out the first official AADHAAR numbers in the tribal district of Nandurbar on Wednesday, civil society activists in the capital are questioning the very basis of the ambitious Unique Identification (UID) scheme. “Even basic procedures have not been followed before launching such a massive project,” said Usha Ramanathan, an expert in law, poverty and civil rights. “The people of India, as well as Parliamentarians need to...

India is planning to replicate China's barefoot doctor experiment in the legal field aiming to train one lakh para-legal volunteers who would tell rural people not to sleep over their rights violations and encourage them to take recourse to justice system for remedial measures. Nearly 30 years after China abolished the barefoot doctor scheme under which farmers were given basic medical and para-medical training to work in rural areas, the...

KEY TRENDS   • Maternal Mortality Ratio for India was 370 in 2000, 286 in 2005, 210 in 2010, 158 in 2015 and 145 in 2017. Therefore, the MMRatio for the country decreased by almost 61 percent between 2000 and 2017 *14    • As per the NSS 71st round, among rural females aged 5-29 years, the main reasons for dropping out/ discontinuance were: engagement in domestic activities, not interested in education, financial constraints and marriage. Among rural males aged...

While India’s new Right to Education Act seeks to bring free and compulsory education for all children, it seems to short-change them through an unrealistic vision of the private sector’s involvement. In August 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Indian Parliament with no debate, by the fewer than 60 members who happened to be attending the session that day. Not that the Act was an open-and-shut...

The institution of the BPL list has probably become the most potent symbol of the self-defeating approach of the Indian state towards poverty. Ostensibly this list, that identifies households below the poverty line so that benefits can be directed towards them, was meant as an instrument of poverty alleviation. Now it has become one of the biggest sources of obfuscation of the challenges of poverty. A poverty line is, at...