-The Business Standard   Having enrolled 200 million Indian citizens for Aadhaar, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is now taking the initial steps to the services route. UIDAI chairperson Nandan Nilekani said that they have started two pilots that will allow the oil industry to bring in transparency in LPG transfer and the use of Aadhaar for getting mobile connectivity. UIDAI is running a pilot in Mysore using the Aadhaar platform for...

-PTI   Reflecting the utmost priority to address farm sector woes, a first-of-its-kind workshop was held on Wednesday at the initiative of President Pratibha Patil where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pitched for raising agriculture output to provide food security to citizens.  At the workshop attended by eight Union ministers, 20 governors, five chief ministers and 37 vice chancellors of agricultural universities, Patil underlined the need for "out-of-the-box" solutions to enhance productivity in rainfed...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

World Bank arm finances polluting steel mill in Jharkhand As the train slowly approaches Jamshedpur town in Jharkhand, the sky begins to turn reddish. It is because of the thick red dust emanating from an industrial unit, surrounded by heaps of industrial solid waste comprising unburnt coal char and flyash. The unit is a medium-scale iron and steel mill belonging to conglomerate Usha Martin. Spread over 120 hectares, the mill became operational...

There will be no additional cost to the EPR 1650 MWe Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR), a Generation III+ nuclear reactor developed by Areva of France, in complying with the additional safety requirements recommended by the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) in its Complementary Safety Assessment (CSA) report submitted in January. This was stated by Dr. Bernard Bigot, Chairman of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), at a...