-The Indian Express Farmer producer organisations have truly taken off. Now’s the time to create their own lobbying platform. In the summer of 2011, as the managing director of the Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), an autonomous society under the Union Agriculture Ministry, I addressed a group of Uttar Pradesh government officials in Lucknow. My hosts politely sat through my presentation and near-evangelical pitch, as I pushed the idea of promoting farmer...

-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...

-The Indian Express The Aadhaar is no solution to the problems of the Midday Meal Scheme The Aadhaar scheme was initiated by the UPA government about seven years ago. But it is to the credit of the current Narendra Modi-led government that it saw the potential of Aadhar as an enabler of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes and used it for the dispersal of subsidies. But the government has got it wrong...

-HuffingtonPost.in This is a way to force Aadhaar enrolment, not fix the scheme. Children will suffer. I am not usually an opponent of Aadhaar, India's controversial scheme to give a unique identification number to all residents of India, with their biometric information seeded into it. Any fears that I may have about privacy or surveillance or misuse are overridden by my experience that what the poor want is to be counted, not...

-IANS   Bhubaneswar: The Odisha government has so far granted 4.09 lakh individual titles and community titles under the Forest Rights Act (fra), 2006, a state minister said on Friday. “While 4,03,760 individual titles have been distributed, 5,891 community titles have been settled under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006,” Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Development Minister Lal Bihari Himirika told the assembly. The state government...