-The Times of India   Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani has said that the unique identity programme or 'Aadhaar' should not be viewed as "a technologically complicated and purposeless activity". "The programme has much wider and scalable applications for ensuring effective and efficient delivery of public distribution system (PDS) and welfare services," he said while delivering the inaugural speech at the launch of the Pune International Centre...

The government has introduced the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation & Resettlement Bill, 2011, in Parliament. The Bill fails to address fundamental causes behind disputes and litigation over compensation. Moreover, like the existing law, it has provisions that can be misused by states to favour companies at the expense of the rights of farmers and forest dwellers. An excessive use of the emergency clause is not the only abuse of the current law...

Five years into the implementation of the right to work programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has the potential to create even sharper division between states than what existed before it was launched. This is becoming increasingly clear through reports like the second report of the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on NREGA, released last week in Delhi by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. It is...

-IANS   The CBI on Wednesday filed a case against the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) officials and a private firm for irregularities in the 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG). Raids are also being made at 21 locations, including in Delhi and Mumbai, officials said. "We have registered a new case in connection with the CWG regarding the construction of an indoor stadium for squash and badminton in the Siri Fort complex," a CBI official...

While Indian psychiatrists have rejected a World Health Organisation (WHO) study portraying India as the depression capital of the world, they say it has indirectly drawn attention to an acute shortage of trained personnel and facilities to deal with mental illness. "Declaring India as having the highest rate of major depression in the world is an aberration in interpretation," Dr. Roy Abraham Kallivayalil, secretary-general of the World Association of Social Psychiatry,...