-The New Indian Express BENGALURU: Sajida Begum, 65, has been living at the Leprosy Hospital on Magadi Road for the past 10 years. Her family left her at the hospital years ago and does not come to visit. This leprosy patient’s only sustenance is the Rs 1,000 pension that she gets every month. Three months ago, this was stopped for the lack of an Aadhaar card. Sajida has lost her fingers and...

-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...

-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...