-The Hindu Most of the earnings of the average farm household were spent in meeting consumption expenditures. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a slew of measures in the Union Budget 2017 to boost the agriculture sector. Higher agricultural credit, higher allocation for irrigation projects, a crop insurance scheme and increased allocations for MGNREGA to dig farm ponds were among the measures announced on February 1. But will these help attain the goal...

-NDTV The rock-star days are back for Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian, who had maintained a studied silence ever since India scored an economic self-goal over his head on 8 November 2016. His ambitious Economic Survey, released on Tuesday, includes a much-awaited presentation of the Finance Ministry's thinking on Universal Basic Income (UBI). Contrary to some media reports, the Survey does not advocate a specific plan for UBI in India. Rather,...

-The Hindu The idea of a basic income is not new. The first known suggestion on an unconditional universal basic income for all adults regardless of other income sources was from Thomas More. Centuries later, in 1918, Bertrand Russell discussed a basic income sufficient for necessities as central to the social model combining the advantages of anarchism and socialism that he argued for in Proposed Roads to Freedom. “A certain small...

-Caravan Magazine Since the Aadhaar programme, which aims to provide Indian citizens with unique identification numbers, was launched in 2009, several petitions have been filed before the Supreme Court that oppose its application by the government. These petitions have challenged the Aadhaar programme on various grounds: the government’s right to ask the citizens to provide biometric data for Aadhaar verification without adequate safeguards against its potential misuse; the legality of the...

-The Indian Express Governments are making Aadhaar mandatory in contravention of court orders One reason for the controversy surrounding the Aadhaar project is the pending litigation against it in the Supreme Court. The cases draw on substantive critiques, including exclusion and deprivation caused by the usage of Aadhaar in provisioning essential services such as the PDS and MGNREGA, breaches of individual privacy and threats to national and individual security in the way...