-Tehelka Are we eating sugar which small kids are producing as bonded labour? FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mahendra Singh used to live with his parents and two siblings in the Jahangirpuri slum area of New Delhi until the morning he was abducted, trafficked and then callously ‘sold’ to a sugarcane farmer of Haryana’s Karnal district. Mahendra was made to work as a bonded labourer in the sugarcane fields for three-and-a-half long years, until he finally...

-The Times of India More than 30 billion apps were downloaded in 2011 and three-quarters of the world's inhabitants now have access to a mobile phone. India has 70 mobile subscriptions per 100 people, a new report from the World Bank says. "Mobile communication has arguably had a bigger impact on humankind in a shorter period of time than any other invention in human history," the "Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing...

It is a manifestation of the Indian summer — the electricity goes out momentarily at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) head office just before an interview with the director general and mission director, Ram Sewak Sharma. Despite glitches, mostly more consequential than power outages, Sharma reveals that it has been a busy few months for the UIDAI, after it reached the mandated number of 200 million enrolments by March...

The railway ministry is helpless about the discomfort of railway passengers in reserved compartments who are outnumbered by passengers without tickets or with tickets meant for unreserved compartments   Last month, my friend’s daughter went on a trip to Corbett Park, which was organised by a Pune-based nature trail group. Although they had booked a Second Class (ordinary) reserved compartment, most of the 30-hour journey was spent in utter discomfort, with people...

-The Hindu A definite acknowledgement of the potential of Aadhar for public service delivery, and especially for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) by Bharat Bhatti, Jean Drèze, and Reetika Khera in their article “Experiments with Aadhaar” (editorial page, The Hindu, June 27, 2012), is a small step for Aadhaar, but a giant leap for the authors! Process re-engineering in government is never easy, there is enormous resistance both...