-Business Standard Dr A B P Pandey, Director General and Mission Director of UIDAI speaks to Nitin Sethi on how the efficacy of Aadhaar will be monitored and what challenges it faces as it reaches the 100 crore enrolment mark. * Challenges now that the law is in place… Once the law is notified, then one be the procedural challenge. Government will have to notify necessary rules under the law and UIDAI will...

-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 An all-woman team of reporters finds a massive online readership in the Bundelkhand region of northern India A homemade drone is shot down because the police think it belongs to the IS. A temple is built for a dacoit and his wife. A group of journalists are stalked for months until their story goes viral on the internet, after which a sleepy police station immediately swings into action. Reporting is...

-The Indian Express If the government does not have the will to regulate 55,000 pre-natal diagnostic clinics, how will it track 29 million pregnancies annually? I was inspired by Maneka Gandhi’s struggle to get back her passport (impounded by the Janata Party government) as an IIT student in 1977. Her Supreme Court case led to a landmark judgment on personal liberty. Subsequently Gandhi filed petitions in courts to protect animal rights....

-The Indian Express Processes of knowledge diffusion reinforce inequalities. We need explicit pro-poor targeting of efforts There is much enthusiasm today for efforts to improve access to information about poor people’s rights and entitlements. In a much-debated recent example, Facebook’s “Free Basics” platform aimed to provide free access to a selected slice of the internet (including, of course, Facebook). In arguing for Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg said that “everyone… deserves access to...