-The Times of India Bringing a sigh of relief to parents who were being pressured by schools to provide their wards' Aadhaar numbers, the state government clarified to the Karnataka high court on Thursday that it is not mandatory. Government advocate ES Indiresh told the court instructions have been issued to schools saying that Aadhaar is optional. The government made the submission before Justice Ashok B Hinchigeri in response to a petition...

-DNA When it comes to farmers, the government has precious little to offer The monsoon season is over. With 14 per cent shortfall in the amount of rains, and with nearly 39 per cent of the cropped area in the country hit by a crippling drought, I was expecting the Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan to announce a series of monetary benefits and exemptions in credit repayments for farmers....

-Scroll.in   An audit of ration shops after the introduction of Aadhaar revealed that many genuine beneficiaries couldn’t collect food grain due to system glitches. The Modi government’s insistence on the use of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based unique identification project, to weed out “ghosts, fakes, duplicates” from social welfare schemes is counterproductively excluding genuine beneficiaries from the programmes. In Andhra Pradesh, an official audit conducted after ration shops adopted the Aadhaar system revealed that many...

-The Times of india The stand-off between the judiciary and the legislature over the procedure for appointing judges comes at a time when the country's 24 high courts have 397 pending vacancies for judges, and what's more, eight of them having acting chief justices. It is not clear at this point whether these vacancies can now be filled through the earlier collegium system or that will have to wait till the system...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday permitted citizens to voluntarily use Aadhaar cards to avail benefits under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, along with Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and schemes related to pension and PF after the government promised that absence of Aadhaar would not debar people from benefiting from the schemes concerned. The relief came from a bench of Chief Justice HL...