-The Times of India BENGALURU: For most residents of Bhangi colony near KR Market, pressing on the Aadhaar-enabled point-of-sale (PoS) machine at the nearby ration store is a crucial exercise that is riddled with unpredictability. For, the machine could deny their share of subsidized food, simply by not recognizing their thumb impression. Despite most of them having successfully seeded their Aadhaar numbers with Ration cards, many are struggling to get foodgrains from...

-The Pioneer Raipur: The Chhattisgarh State Civil Supplies Corporation’s (CGSCSC) distribution centre module is now implemented at 120 warehouses of 108 distribution centres in the State, officials informed. The stocks and sales figures of previous month of all the Fair Price Shops (FPSs) are entered into this module and the actual amount of PDS commodities to be issued to FPS is calculated by this web based software and delivery order and truck...

-The Indian Express In Jharkhand, ABBA was first made compulsory for PDS users in Ranchi district in August 2016. By June 2017, it was mandatory in about 80 per cent of the ration shops across the state. This meant, of course, that Aadhaar itself was compulsory — no Aadhaar, no food. Recent events in Jharkhand shed some useful light on the damage done by compulsory biometric authentication in the Public Distribution...

-The Hindu Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication does nothing in the battle against graft — there are better alternatives In a sickening way, October 2017 was like October 2002. Fifteen years ago, in Rajasthan’s Baran and Udaipur districts, there was a spate of starvation deaths. The government of the time made up fanciful stories to deny that the deaths had anything to do with hunger or government failure. In October 2017, the death of an 11-year-old...

-Tehelka.com Learning from the recent starvation deaths in Jharkhand, the nation’s leaders must pay heed to the necessity of ensuring food security for all Food and hunger have been important issues this past month and the news has not been welcome. First it was India’s dismal rank in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2017 released by the International Policy Research Institute rankings — 100th among 119 countries. GHI looks at undernourishment, child...