-Livemint.com The government relies on for-profit big business to deliver public goods despite their inability to deliver Can we listen to the budget as an annual public statement by the government of its economic and social philosophy and intent? The centre abandoned five-year plans that earlier laid down a road map of where government policies are headed. The budget, then, is an important reality check of whether the government is literally...

-Down to Earth Activists have been demanding that the land reforms Bill be brought in Parliament since 2012 Following a two-day protest by more than a thousand landless rural Poor at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, activists claim Prime Minister Narendra Modi has assured protestors that the government will bring the Bill supporting homestead land rights for them before the Parliament. Land rights activists, who met the prime minister at the...

-Scroll.in Activists also challenge the government's proposal to make Aadhaar mandatory for social schemes. Soon after the Budget was presented in the Parliament on February 29, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described its provisions as pro-Poor, pro-farmer and pro-village. But two weeks on, seven grassroots campaigns working on the right to food, public health, education, sanitation, and the rural employment guarantee programme said that the Budget will fail to sustain existing welfare schemes. In...

-Press Release from Delhi Pension Parishad Activists from seven major campaigns stated unequivocally that the Union Budget for 2016-17 far from ‘Transforming India’, as claimed by the Finance Minister, Shri Arun Jaitley, is neglecting the interests of farmers, the Poor and vulnerable both in nominal and real terms and subjecting every life-affirming program to severe  budget cuts. Activists from seven major campaigns such as the Right to Food Campaign , the...

-The Hindu The Aadhaar Bill opens the door to mass surveillance. This danger needs to be seen in the light of recent attacks on the right to dissent. No other country, and certainly no democratic country, has ever held its own citizens hostage to such a powerful infrastructure of surveillance. The Aadhaar project was sold to the public based on the claim that enrolment was “voluntary”. This basically meant that there was...