-Livemint.com The Aadhaar project is a textbook example of how not to design and execute a public policy initiative in India When it was first launched in 2009, Aadhaar signalled a promise to repair the corroded plumbing of India’s leaky public delivery systems. The unique biometric identity would help reduce duplicate and ghost entries in the list of beneficiaries of government schemes, and pave the way for direct benefit transfers to them...

-PTI Aadhaar number will be required for one-time registration at the IRCTC ticketing site. The railways will soon move towards Aadhaar-based online ticketing system to prevent touts from blocking bulk tickets, end fraudulent bookings and curb cases of impersonation. Aadhaar number has been made mandatory for senior citizens to avail concessions in train tickets from April 1. A three-month trial run for this is going on. As per the new business plan 2017-18, unveiled...

-The Hindu Plea against govt. order making it mandatory for scholarship schemes. The Centre was caught red-handed defying a Supreme Court order directing that no citizen will be denied benefits under a government scheme for want of an Aadhaar card. A Bench of Justices Gopala V. Gowda and A.K. Goel discovered that the Centre had been insisting that students submit their Aadhaar number for applying for government scholarship schemes. On October 15, 2015, a...

Although the focus of erstwhile UPA and the present NDA government has been to achieve higher economic growth by reaping the 'demographic dividend', a recent report from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) informs us that a substantial chunk of the population underwent ageing during the last 60 years. The report entitled Elderly in India: Profile and Programmes 2016 from CSO (that comes under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation) shows...

-Kafila.org The last few months have seen an unusual public engagement around questions of secularism, freedom of speech, sedition and the like, with furious debates everywhere from our campuses, streets and TV studios to the floor of Parliament. The budget session has been enlivened by scenes of high drama, with the leading lights of the Treasury benches bringing colour, sound and fury to their tutorials on patriotism and nationalism. While these high-decibel...