The Digital India Mission, launched by the NDA government, aims to connect 2.5 lakh village panchayats with high speed broadband internet by December, 2016 so that citizens can access online services. However, available facts reveal that this is a difficult task to be accomplished. In rural areas, among the youth aged 14-29 about 82 percent do not know how to operate a computer. In urban areas, nearly 51 percent of youth...
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Government moves to minimise impact of SC Aadhaar verdict -Aloke Tikku
-Hindustan Times New Delhi: A week after the Supreme Court delivered its interim order on use of Aadhaar numbers, the government on Thursday decided to continue seeding the identity numbers into the database of beneficiaries if people voluntarily shared the numbers. The government has also found a way to minimise the impact of the verdict on Aadhaar-linked schemes. The Supreme Court had, last week, restricted the government from using the Aadhaar number for...
More »Push irrigation, not dams -Mihir Shah
-The Indian Express We can add millions of hectares to irrigated land without building a single new dam. We just need to adopt a different method of managing the water already stored in them. One of the drivers of India’s irrigation sector has been the construction of large dams on our rivers, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as “the temples of modern India”. While these dams have helped increase India’s irrigated...
More »Whistleblowing in the time of Vyapam -Amrita Johri & Anjali Bhardwaj
-The Indian Express Why is no political party protesting the non-implementation of the protection act? With suspicious attacks on whistleblowers, the Vyapam scam has highlighted the vulnerability of those who show truth to power. The string of corruption scandals that have surfaced in the last three months have established what many believe — in a country the size and diversity of India, it is impossible for a centralised mechanism to control corruption...
More »Funding crisis puts India's AIDS programme, and lives, at risk
-Reuters NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: India's fight against AIDS is being jeopardized by a cut in social spending by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, with health workers being laid off and programmes to prevent the spread of the deadly disease curtailed. With about 2.1 million people infected with HIV in 2013, India has the most cases in the Asia-Pacific, according to the World Health Organization, but new infections have fallen more than 20 percent...
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