-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government's spending on the rural job scheme increased 10 per cent in the last fiscal despite a matching decline in the number of beneficiaries because of deletion, challenging claims that weeding out bogus card-holders helped cut down on expenditure and pointing to the lack of jobs in rural areas. After verification, the government struck off the names of 1.62 crore job card-holders under the Mahatma Gandhi National...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Different answers by two Union ministers to the same question have left the "victim" bewildered. The conflicting answers have both been given in Parliament, making a mockery of the principle of "collective responsibility" of the government. While information technology and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had on February 2 stated that an FIR had been registered against unknown persons over a newspaper report on Aadhaar data breach, junior home...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre on Wednesday will start countering a mountain of legal issues heaped against Aadhaar in the Supreme Court by numerous petitioners in the last two months, primarily focussing on violation of individual’s right to privacy through collection and storage of biometric data. During 19 days of arguments spanning two months since it began on January 17, senior advocates Shyam Divan, Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Gopal...

-The Hindu Business Line The SC interim order presents the biometric ID as a fait accompli for the underprivileged Last week’s interim order of the Supreme Court on a batch of petitions challenging Aadhaar may have provided temporary relief to a section of the population, but it appears to have simultaneously served notice on another section – a largely disadvantaged one — that the contentious biometric identification is something of a fait...

-The Economic Times blog Word has it that World Bank economists use “obviously fabricated” data from time to time. These are not Sitaram Yechury or Medha Patkar’s words, but those of Paul Romer, former chief economist of the World Bank, in a recent email exchange reported by Financial Times. Romer retracted them later, but this “may not end the controversy”, as The Economist mildly put it. This is not the first time...