It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...

The Mumbai Collector had, in a letter to the Defence Estates Officer, Mumbai Circle, dated July 12, 2004, denied that the government of Maharashtra allotted any land to the Adarsh Cooperative Housing Society in Colaba. Records obtained using the Right to Information (RTI) Act by the National Alliance of Peoples' Movements (NAPM), which were released on Monday by Ms. Medha Patkar, Simpreet Singh and other activists, show that the Collector accorded...

It is imperative that the committee constituted to look into charges of corruption in the Commonwealth Games should also include violations of labour laws within its purview. One of the more blatant and visible scams of the recently concluded Commonwealth Games relates to how the thousands of workers who worked on the games construction sites were denied minimum wages, safety equipment, housing and other benefits constitutionally due to them. In an interview...

The Aadhaar or UID project has grave implications for every Indian. It will enable the government to profile every citizen and track their movements and transactions. There is no guarantee that intimate personal information -- pre-existing illnesses, romantic relationships etc -- won't be shared with other agencies, warns Praful Bidwai. An elaborate charade has begun with the rolling out of the first Aadhaar unique identity numbers in a tribal district of Maharashtra by...

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...