-The Business Standard Food insecurity and hunger are rooted in bad policies, faulty design, poor governance and a lack of political will According to the latest Global Hunger Report, India continues to be in the category of those nations where hunger is "alarming". What is worse, despite high growth, the hunger index in India between 1996 and 2011 has gone up from 22.9 to 23.7. National Sample Survey Organisation data show that...
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Cyber insecurity is the new normal -Preeti Singh
-The Hindustan Times A couple of months ago, I was in South Block for a meeting at the ministry of defence. Security norms dictate leaving mobile and electronic devices at the checkpoint. Imagine my horror when I came back an hour later to see one of the guards going through my iPad. This cavalier attitude towards individual privacy is illustrative of an interesting dilemma between the inevitability of a more intrusive...
More »A food security ordinance that will stimulate food inflation is passing strange
-The Times of India The Parliament's monsoon session is only about a month away. That the Union cabinet has yet taken the ordinance route to implement the national food security Bill signals the scam-tainted UPA government's desperation to woo voters before the next general elections. But the hope that expanding what is already one of the world's largest food security programmes will boost political fortunes is hallucinatory. The exchequer is already...
More »Use Aadhaar and EMV both for retail payments
-The Economic Times An RBI-appointed panel of bankers will decide on the appropriate technology for retail payments in a month. And the choice is reportedly between Aadhaar, the biometric-based unique identity system, and EMV, a globally accepted technology standard for credit card, debit card and ATM transactions, used by Visa and MasterCard. This is baffling. Why should it be one technology standard or the other? Both Aadhaar and EMV should co-exist...
More »Why the Food Security Bill is neither populist nor unaffordable-Ashok Kotwal
-The Economic Times Criticism of the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) has led to the government dropping the idea of issuing an Ordinance and, instead, saying it would try to get the Bill passed in a special session of Parliament. But doubts persist over the very concept of the Bill. Is it not extravagant to subsidise food for such a large part of the population when the poor constitute only 30 per...
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