-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...

-The Hindu Business Line Ten years on, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act endures because it provides the poor a political voice February 2016 marks a decade since India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA) came into force. NREGA is both revolutionary and modest; it promises every rural household one hundred days of employment annually on public-works projects, but the labour is taxing and pays minimum wage, at best. Many charges have...

-The Indian Express If India is to improve its ease of doing business rank, the Centre needs to partner with states Twenty-five years ago, there would have been no interest in a subject such as the ease of doing business in India. What mattered then was the level of protection the closed economy provided and the ability to negotiate industrial approvals from Udyog Bhawan. Much water has since flown down the...

-TheWire.in When the data tells us insurance-based health schemes have not reduced out-of-pocket expenditure for the poor, Jaitley’s budgetary focus should have been on boosting public provision of health care. Despite sustained economic growth for over two decades, improvements in health indicators in India have not kept pace. By 2015, India was able to meet only four out of the ten health targets set under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for that...

-Business Standard Indian economy is closely integrated with the global economy, which is facing a slowdown, and so the headwinds are difficult to avoid, Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian told journalists in an interaction after presenting the Economic Survey 2015-16. In this uncertain environment, monetary and fiscal policies should aim to purchase insurance, so to speak, against the global slowdown, he said. Edited excerpts: * In the backdrop of a global slowdown,...