-The Indian Express Aadhaar doesn’t empower people, only the state Ironically, in the week that the UIDAI revealed its draconian face, serving a legal notice to those who exposed flaws in the Aadhaar eco-system, Ajay Pandey (CEO, UIDAI), wrote, “The critics tend to forget that Aadhaar empowers the people, not the state” (‘Criticisms Without Aadhaar’, IE, May 13). However, government data reveals that Pandey is wrong to believe that “Aadhaar empowers...

-PTI NEW DELHI: In the next two years, the government today said it will focus on nutritional security of the country's two-third poor population registered with the public distribution system (PDS) under the food law. The food law aims to provide legal entitlement of 5 kg subsidised foodgrains per person every month at Rs 1-3/kg to 23.3 crore registered members. The law was passed by Parliament in September 2013, during the previous...

-The Economic Times Aadhaar came with a lot of promises. They were brought by some of the brightest in India. Aadhaar promises to remove duplicates and ghosts from government databases, deliver subsidies to beneficiaries, collect taxes, provide financial inclusion and eliminate corruption. Here is why it cannot deliver anything it promises. Aadhaar came with a lot of promises. They were brought by some of the brightest in India. Promise 1: Removing Fraud and Duplicates In...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Jharkhand’s bureaucrats have denied thousands of farm workers their legally mandated livelihoods under the guise of plugging leakages in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), say activists. Earlier this month, HT reported that the ministry of rural development had cancelled 93 lakh MGNREGA job cards — of which 2.67 lakh cards were from Jharkhand — to weed out duplicates and cards corresponding to dead beneficiaries. At the...

-NDTV NEW DELHI: Soon after the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) issued a notification making Aadhaar card mandatory for accessing mid-day meals, it released data claiming that thanks to Aadhaar, four lakh 'ghost' or duplicate students enrolled with the state education department had been detected. This discovery was used to bolster the government's defence that Aadhaar can help curb corruption in the school lunch scheme, and ward off criticism from critics...