-Scroll.in Errors in linking Aadhaar to bank accounts under MNGREGA has meant many workers are going unpaid. It is easy to wake a person who is sleeping, but difficult to wake someone pretending to be asleep. This aphorism rings true for several decisions of the Modi government. One such example is the manner in which the government has pushed the unique identity project, despite several Supreme Court orders stating that the Aadhaar...

-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 batch of PILs has sought directions to various state governments as well as the Centre “to take immediate and appropriate actions against the vigilantes, who in the garb of Gau Rakshak Dals (cow protection groups) had been spreading violence..." BARELY A week after a man was killed, allegedly by ‘gau rakshaks’ (cow protectors), on suspicion of transporting cows in Alwar, the Supreme Court Friday sought responses from the...

-The Indian Express Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu has rejected the Congress allegations, saying the proposed Rules regarding the word limit and application fees remain the same as they were under the UPA government. On March 31, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), the nodal department for the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI), put on its web site a circular titled “Framing RTI Rules, 2017 in supersession of...