-Scroll.in Questions arise again over Delhi’s welfare delivery system – close on the heels of the starvation deaths of three girls in July. In May, Ram Baran, a resident of Savitri Nagar in Delhi, received a letter from the ration circle office stating that his ration card would be cancelled because he had not collected foodgrains between January and March. The letter added that unless he submitted his Aadhaar number, electricity...
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Draft data-protection bill proposes offline verification for Aadhaar; strengthens UIDAI and weakens RTI provisions -Arshu John
-CaravanMagazine.in Nearly a year ago, the government of India constituted a committee of experts chaired by the former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna to draft a data-protection law for India. Almost immediately, the committee became mired in controversy—it was first criticised for the lack of civil-society representatives among its members, and subsequently for the opacity of its proceedings, and its inefficient public consultation on the data-protection framework. In recent months, the...
More »Dark clouds over the RTI -Aruna Roy & Nikhil Dey
-The Hindu Any move to amend the RTI Act must involve public consultation The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)government has struck another blow against transparency and accountability. Its already negative track record — that has been marked by an unwillingness to operationalise the Lok Pal, the Whistleblowers Act and the Grievance Redress law — has taken another step backwards if one is to go by a single line in item 14 in the...
More »PMFBY: Modi govt's crop insurance scheme sees decline in farmers' enrolment -Namrata Acharya
-Business Standard Between FY16 and FY17, the number of farmers enrolled in the scheme declined from about 57.3 million to about 48.5 million, a fall of around 15% Kolkata: The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), the flagship crop insurance scheme of the Narendra Modi government, has entered its third year of operation, albeit with a substantial decline in farmers' enrolment in its second year, the data reveals. Between FY16 and FY17, the...
More »Know your Aadhaar -Jean Dreze
-The Indian Express Bill Gates’s claim that it raises no privacy concerns is misleading. Crucial issues that have to do with confidentiality of data and state surveillance are at stake. According to Bill Gates, privacy is not a concern with Aadhaar (‘Aadhaar doesn’t pose any privacy issue, says Bill Gates’, IE, May 3). This widely-quoted statement would have been more convincing if Gates had shown a clear understanding of the Aadhaar project....
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