-PTI NEW DELHI: The UIDAI has provided some "relaxation" to banks in procurement of enrolment machines and hiring private data entry operators for their aadhaar centres, and hopes that banks will offer such services at stipulated 10% of the branches "at the earliest", its CEO Ajay Bhushan Pandey has said. The aadhaar-issuing body, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), has allowed banks to hire private data entry operators and enrolment machines and...

-PTI NEW DELHI: More than 200 central and state government websites publicly displayed details such as names and addresses of some aadhaar beneficiaries, the Unique Identification Authority of India has said. The aadhaar issuing body added, in response to an RTI query, that it took note of the breach and got the data removed from those websites. It did not specify when the breach took place. It said aadhaar details have never been made...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-The Hindu aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication does nothing in the battle against graft — there are better alternatives In a sickening way, October 2017 was like October 2002. Fifteen years ago, in Rajasthan’s Baran and Udaipur districts, there was a spate of starvation deaths. The government of the time made up fanciful stories to deny that the deaths had anything to do with hunger or government failure. In October 2017, the death of an 11-year-old...

-Tehelka.com Learning from the recent starvation deaths in Jharkhand, the nation’s leaders must pay heed to the necessity of ensuring food security for all Food and hunger have been important issues this past month and the news has not been welcome. First it was India’s dismal rank in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2017 released by the International Policy Research Institute rankings — 100th among 119 countries. GHI looks at undernourishment, child...