-Scroll.in There were 54 attacks on journalists, three cases of TV news channels being banned, 45 internet shutdowns, and as many sedition cases in the past 16 months. Between January 2016 and April 2017, India has witnessed at least 54 reported attacks on journalists, three instances of television news channels being banned, 45 internet shutdowns, and as many sedition cases against individuals and groups. Besides, seven journalists were reportedly killed in...

-Hindustan Times In the index released on Wednesday, India was ranked just three places above Pakistan and was one notch below violence-torn Palestine. India slipped three places in the 2017 world press freedom rankings to 136th among 180 countries, the dismal performance blamed on “Modi’s nationalism” and growing “self-censorship” in the mainstream media. In the index released on Wednesday, India was ranked just three places above Pakistan and was one notch below violence-torn...

-The Hindu Business Line From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. A timeline of the country’s chequered date with the unique identification project You’ve probably read the WhatsApp joke about a post-Aadhaar scenario in 2020 India. A man orders pizza over phone. He is asked for his Aadhaar...

-The Hindu Business Line Aadhaar does more damage than good in welfare programmes It is widely believed that Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) is necessary to improve the delivery of welfare programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), Public Distribution System (PDS), social security pensions, and so on. This is a misconception. We have been studying these programmes for a decade, focusing mainly on the source of leakages and...

-TheWire.in In a country where a majority of the population is engaged in increasingly unviable agriculture, shouldn’t politicians talk about the trade rules that make it so?                 One cannot help but draw parallels between the elections in the US and those in the states in India. While it is best left to psephologists to analyse voting patterns and election results, it’s telling to compare the issues on which the elections are...