-NDTV NEW DELHI: Soon after the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) issued a notification making Aadhaar card mandatory for accessing mid-day meals, it released data claiming that thanks to Aadhaar, four lakh 'ghost' or duplicate students enrolled with the state education department had been detected. This discovery was used to bolster the government's defence that Aadhaar can help curb corruption in the school lunch scheme, and ward off criticism from critics...

-Hindustan Times The recent crackdown on meat shops in Uttar Pradesh offers a peek into the ethical divide that exists between vegetarians and non-vegetarians in India. The increase in meat consumption, intensive animal farming and growing cruelty against animals has given rise to compassion movements across the world. It should be a matter of pride therefore that India is among the most-vegetarian countries in the world. But how does meat become a...

-The Hindu Business Line From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. A timeline of the country’s chequered date with the unique identification project You’ve probably read the WhatsApp joke about a post-Aadhaar scenario in 2020 India. A man orders pizza over phone. He is asked for his Aadhaar...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Opposition today came down hard on the government for the "agrarian crisis" and demanded waiver of loans of farmers across the country and not only of those from Uttar Pradesh as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during campaigning. During a debate on Demand for Grants for the Agriculture Ministry in the Lok Sabha, members from opposition parties said over 12,000 farmers had committed suicide last year and asked...

-Hindustan Times The last few weeks have seen a spate of government notifications making Aadhaar mandatory for receiving the benefits of government programmes. The most recent orders relate to an Aadhaar requirement for children to access schools (even under their fundamental right to education), mid-day meals, supplementary nutrition (ICDS) and scholarships. These directives raise a number of ethical as well as practical questions, besides violating children’s right to education, nutrition and...