-Deccan Herald The government’s decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for children to avail midday meals in schools and nutrition under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme as well as for disabled students to get scholarships is wrong and ill-conceived. The decision was notified this week and it has given the students only a few weeks to comply with it. Aadhaar has been made mandatory for 11 services under a number...

-The Hindu In stark contrast to worldwide trends, women in India are being forced out of the workforce According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), India and Pakistan have the lowest rates of women’s labour force participation in Asia, in sharp contrast to Nepal, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that have the highest, with richer nations like Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia falling in between. Moreover, even this low rate...

-Livemint.com Aadhaar’s designers promised a robust privacy legislation, but the current government’s stance is that Indians have no fundamental right to privacy To govern India is to be constantly overwhelmed. So much needs to be done, and there’s so little to do it with. It’s hardly surprising that the Indian state is rarely ambitious. It seeks to manage, not to transform. One recent government initiative, less than a decade old, is by contrast...

-Hindustan Times Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh’s first “cashless” village is actually “waterless”, prompting villagers to adopt a novel initiative of sourcing water through rooftop water pipes from tubewells located in their agricultural fields 1,000 to 2,000 feet away. Thick black water pipes running over the rooftops and treetops in the village, coming from the agriculture fields MIGht be mistaken as electric wires at first sight. “We don’t care about cashless status as our...

-Hindustan Times The last few weeks have seen a spate of government notifications making Aadhaar mandatory for receiving the benefits of government programmes. The most recent orders relate to an Aadhaar requirement for children to access schools (even under their fundamental right to education), mid-day meals, supplementary nutrition (ICDS) and scholarships. These directives raise a number of ethical as well as practical questions, besides violating children’s right to education, nutrition and...