-The Indian Express Claims that Aadhaar has increased the demand and allocations of NREGA work rest on several faulty assumptions. Two newspaper articles in the Times of India and Financial Express claimed that Aadhaar linking boosts MGNREGA and has cut wage payment delays. Both articles were based on a working paper, “A Friend Indeed”, by members of the Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. The ISB...

-Scroll.inSince August, media reports have highlighted suspension of accounts, marking of news stories as spam by Facebook.With the general elections in India due early in 2019, greater attention is being paid to the digital space, which many believe will have a deep impact on the polls. Much of this attention is focused on Facebook, which was heavily criticised for its conduct in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential...

-The Hindu Business Line The Department of Telecommunications on Friday directed telecom service providers to stop using Aadhaar authentication to verify the KYC of existing mobile customers and to issue new connections. It asked the operators to abide by the order by November 5. The use of “Aadhaar authentication is not permissible for eKYC for verification of telecom subscribers, nor for issuing new mobile connections”, said the DoT in a statement issued...

-PTI New Delhi: The government said demonetisation of high-value currency notes in November 2016 achieved the objectives “quite substantially” even as the Reserve Bank of India reported most of the demonetised currency was back with the banks. The RBI annual report released on Wednesday said 99.3% of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 junked notes came back to banks. “I think demonetisation has achieved its objective quite substantially,” economic affairs secretary Subhash Chandra...

Good news about digital inclusion often leaves little room for reporting on bad experiences, which netizens encounter in the digital world. A recent report by LIRNEAsia – an ICT [information and communication technology] policy and regulation think tank working in the Asia-Pacific – says that almost one among five Indian netizens in the age-group 15-65 years had faced online harassment in 2017. In contrast, roughly twelve out of hundred internet...