-The Indian Express Ever since the Unique Identification (UID) project rolled out, it has had to weather hit-and-run attacks. Concerns about privacy and budgets have been mounted from influential staging posts in attempts to derail the project altogether by isolating the UID Authority of India within the government. Yet the promise of the project, aimed at offering every Indian a secure proof of identity, is so powerful that its momentum remains...

The widespread outrage following the telecast of video footage of Jarawa men and women dancing for tourists is both heartening and disappointing. Heartening because the media made a rather unusual attempt to address the existential challenges of a people known to us as 'primitives' and disappointing because it failed to generate a nuanced debate. The 30-second TV slots accorded to 'experts' and stakeholders served to polarise opinion on the incident...

Muslims, SCs, STs reflect better social indices, closer to national averages Early in the morning, Mohammad Nadeem, a 25-year-old ‘pakka adati’, big wholesaler, at one of Muzaffarnagar’s fruit and vegetable mandis, briskly sets about selling carrots and oranges. As he expertly sifts through sacks of fresh produce, it’s difficult to picture him hawking peanuts by the roadside. But for five years in this bustling western Uttar Pradesh mandi, Nadeem’s store...

An MGNREGA programme officer, currently posted at Bahadurganj in Kishanganj district, has landed in the soup following disclosure about his qualification under the Right To Information (RTI) Act. MGNREGA programme officer Ranjit Kumar Pramanik secured the job allegedly on the basis of a 'fake' MBA certificate, according to a response to the RTI. The officer had submitted MBA certificate claiming that he had obtained the MBA degree from L N Mishra...

-The Economist   Opposition to the world’s biggest biometric identity scheme is growing FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges—feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads—it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world’s biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities. Launched in 2010, under a genial ex-tycoon, Nandan Nilekani, the “unique identity” (UID) scheme is supposed to roll out trustworthy, unduplicated identity numbers based on...