-PTI NEW DELHI: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said on Monday that Aadhaar data is completely safe and secure. Aadhaar number, it said, is not a secret number and it is to be shared with authorised agencies if one wishes to avail a certain service or benefit of government welfare schemes or other services. "Aadhaar data is fully safe and secure and there has been no data leak or breach at...

-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 Times of India NEW DELHI: Bombarding the Supreme Court with statistics to convince it about ease of doing day-to-day activities with Aadhaar, the Centre said 118.64 crore Indians, which is 88% of the population, had obtained Aadhaar and they used it 1,216.8 crore times for authentication purposes. "As of today, the total number of Aadhaar-based authentication is 12,168,022,172. Therefore, the Indian population has used Aadhaar-based authentication over 1,216 crore times to...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government has instructed states not to deny benefits under the public distribution system to beneficiaries who don't have Aadhaar numbers or haven't linked their ration cards to the biometric identifier, the directive coming after a Jharkhand girl's recent death from alleged starvation. It has also asked state governments not to delete eligible households from the list of PDS beneficiaries for non-possession of Aadhaar cards and warned of...

-Scroll.in Aadhaar is depriving the most vulnerable people of their grain entitlements. Eleven-year-old Santoshi Kumari died asking for rice on September 28, eight months after her family stopped getting food rations from the government because their ration card was not linked to their Aadhaar, the biometrics-based 12-digit unique identification number that the Centre wants all Indian residents to have. The child’s death in Jharkhand’s Simdega district has elicited official responses that verge...