-The Hindu Why it’s essential that the Supreme Court speedily hears the Aadhaar petitions There are several conflicting accounts of precisely what transpired when senior advocate Shyam Divan made a request late in March for an early hearing of a batch of petitions that question the validity of the unique identification scheme, implemented through the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 — or the Aadhaar...

-The Indian Express UP’s farm loan waiver could prompt other states to follow suit, evade real reasons for agricultural distress The new Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, has hit the ground running. In his first cabinet meeting, he took three important decisions with regard to farmers. First, he waived farm loans of more than Rs 36,000 crore, primarily of the small and marginal farmers who comprise 92 per cent of the...

-Deccan Herald The last fig leaf of ‘voluntariness’ in Aadhaar dropped when the Lok Sabha passed the Finance Bill 2017 on March 22. The Finance Bill should never have been able to change Aadhaar, but we must remember that it was the same “money bill route” that gave birth to the Aadhaar Act a year ago. Classifying Aadhaar as a money bill was a brazen, unconstitutional and undemocratic strategy used to take...

-Business Standard Not only is your privacy stripped stark naked, the system itself is illegal and vulnerable Indians have serious red tape PTSD. We live with chronic anxiety about the documents that get us the entitlements and paid services we need — food, cooking gas, SIM cards, sale deeds, passports and so on. We’re so tyrannised by bureaucracy that when we hear of an official document that might simplify life, we fall...

-The Indian Express The department is employing what it calls a “360 degree profiling” of taxpayers ARMED WITH information on cash deposits of over Rs 2 lakh by tax assessees through a newly inserted column in the income-tax returns for 2017-18, the tax department has started the process of scrutinising and matching details with those provided earlier by banks and financial institutions. Alongside this, a list has been readied of about 1.37 crore...