Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s ambitious new effort on land survey and consolidation could become another perilous flirtation with the hornet’s nest. Days after its unveiling at the presentation of the first annual report card of Nitish’s second term, a top minister in his cabinet sounded both alarm and caution on the land survey proposal. “Land, as the chief minister himself knows, is an extremely sensitive and volatile issue,” he told The...

The suggestion has been made in a note to the cabinet committee on UID project headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh The Planning Commission has recommended that the unique identity (UID) programme’s beneficiaries such as public sector banks, insurance companies, state governments and welfare programmes pay for the enrolment of people since the benefits to them will outstrip the costs incurred. The suggestion has been made in a note to the cabinet...

At the technical level, the question is whether the technology deployed for identification will return answers that are unambiguous. THE Unique Identification (UID) project, the national project of the Government of India, aims to give a unique 12-digit number – called Aadhaar – to every citizen of the country, a random number that is generated and linked to a person's demographic and biometric information. The key word is “unique”. Launched in...

Despite 60 years of Constitutional guarantees and two decades after the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, India's children still continue to face grave violation of their basic rights, an independent social audit has revealed. “We do not have a National Policy for Children defining the ‘child'. In fact, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has time and again recommended that a...

The UID in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act may simplify the administrator's task, but will not make a poor man's task any easier. EVERY time there is talk of tinkering with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), it is time we recalled how and why the Act came into existence. The passage of the NREGA was Parliament's response to a people's movement that grew out of the recognition and...