Media Reports The UID Aadhaar project planning and system design shortcomings and security risks at the national (or macro) level have been discussed elsewhere.1 The present article views the Aadhaar project at the system operational level, with practical considerations based on observed and probable functioning at the service delivery end. Consider the following report in a local daily, The Mysore Bugle: Food riots: PDS outlet vandalised Mysore: August 2, 2015—The PDS outlet in Ashokpuram...

IN preparing the approach paper to the Twelfth Five Year Plan, the Planning Commission engaged “all interested persons” in the country in a wide, web-based consultative exercise and also involved a varied group of “stakeholders”. The resulting document clearly indicates some awareness of the complex problems likely to be faced by the economy in the coming period. But it falls short of expectations because it does not provide a cohesive...

A week after the Planning Commission submitted to India’s top court an affidavit on its assessment of who the poor are, several leading economists have urged the government to delink food entitlements from what they call “faulty” poverty measures. Last week, in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, India’s apex planning body said the spending threshold per capita for the poverty line was Rs.32 per day (per person) in cities and...

I hear that the Planning Commission is planning to push the poverty line down a few notches so that a lot of folks can now come out bobbing up to the surface. This is being considered not out of some malicious attempt to make really poor people look just plain poor so that the real estate price in your area goes up that wee bit, but to “ensure the adequacy...

The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...