-The Indian Express Delhi air pollution: The current smog and poor air quality in the National Capital Region has been blamed in part on stubble burning by farmers, especially in neighbouring Punjab and Haryana. What is the genesis of the problem? What are its potential solutions? * How widespread is crop stubble burning? It is mainly confined to Punjab, Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where farmers grow paddy and...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: The pleas of a mother of a 27-year-old with cerebral palsy, who failed to get Aadhaar-registered despite three attempts because of his physical disability, prompted the Calcutta high court on Thursday to ask the central government one simple question: why were people, including those with serious disability, being forced to knock on the judiciary's doors to get themselves on the Aadhaar platform? Sanat Maitra has 83 per...

-The Indian Express Exclusion and denial of benefits to the poor needs urgent attention The news last month of the starvation death of an 11-year-old girl in the Simdega district in Jharkhand, allegedly because of denial of PDS ration due to Aadhaar linking problems, is appalling. The Aadhaar ecosystem definitely needs to pass a stringent welfare test much more crucially than the privacy test. Aadhaar undeniably has potential, and can perhaps even be...

-Livemint.com While all of the post offices in India are supposed to have internet (and be digitized by the end of the year), internet connectivity is non-functional at several units Last month I read an interesting article about India’s postmen. It talked about the changing duties of postmen and the changing role of post offices. By the end of the article I was thinking of a scenario where our close to 2...

-The Hindu Existing subscribers have time till December 31, 2017 to link their Aadhaar The Union government has made linking Aadhaar mandatory for the Public Provident Fund (PPF), the National Savings Certificates (NSC) and the Kisan Vikas Patra (KVP). In a series of four notifications, the government said the existing subscribers have time till December 31, 2017 to link their Aadhaar. "Provided further that every depositor under this scheme who has not given his...