-The Times of India LONDON: London School of Economics' Ideas for Growth conference on Monday hailed the Bihar government's 'bicycles-to-girls' policy as one that can be imitated globally. Bihar witnessed a 30% increase in school attendance by girls in just one year, thanks to the bicycles policy. With a high school dropout rate among girls, the state government had rolled out the policy under which every 14-year-old schoolgirl was given Money to...

-The Hindu Launched in 2006 by the JD(U)-BJP government at the time, the scheme provided Money to all girls who enrolled in Class IX through their schools to buy themselves a cycle. The first independent, scientific evaluation of the impact of Bihar's cycles-for-girls programme has shown that the scheme significantly improved female school enrolment and substantially reduced the gender gap in secondary school enrolment. The study, by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at...

-The Hindu The power of the bicycles to confer economic and social freedom even in the age of the automobile remains undiminished. Bihar is using it to cut the dropout rate for girls. Bicycles and safe roads are a winning combination. While she was on her way to school one morning, Smriti's bicycle brushed against a speeding truck, and she fell to the ground. After a few stitches on her injured elbow,...

-The Hindu Former Justice K.S. Puttaswamy, who went to court against the linking of state benefits to the UID scheme, says much Money has been wasted on the ‘dangerous' project The Supreme Court order restraining the linking of services and benefits to the 12-digit Aadhaar number has placed in doubt ambitious plans by the Centre and several State governments to make the ‘voluntary' Aadhaar scheme mandatory for access to services and subsidies....

-The Times of India MUMBAI: A few weeks after RBI governor Raghuram Rajan stressed on building credit histories of individuals based on the Aadhaar number, one bank has introduced unique identity-based eKYC for opening loan and savings accounts. Axis Bank, which is using payment company Visa's network to access Aadhaar database , will introduce the eKYC facility in around 25 branches next week. The branches will open loan and deposit accounts based...