Kartik Burman, 46, is a rag picker from Bengal, living near Nizamuddin in Delhi for the past 10 years. He is being enrolled for the Unique Identification Project or the UID. So when he goes out to demand a job under NREGA or get a ration card he won't have a problem. The likes of this old rag picker too are hoping for a better deal in life. Mukhtar Ahmed, homeless, says,...

The historian Ramachandra Guha has famously described India as a fifty-fifty democracy. But even admirers of India as a functioning democracy will perhaps be forced to admit that certain events in 2010 forced the needle to move beyond fifty against democracy. Threats to democracy and democratic rights have never been as evident, and as powerful, since the dark days of the Emergency in 1975-76 as they were in the course...

Activists, intellectuals, students and academicians gathered at Jantar Mantar earlier this week in protest against the life imprisonment sentence pronounced by a Chhattisgarh court for human rights activist Binayak Sen. The protest was organised by the All-India Students' Association, People's Union for Civil Liberties and All-India Progressive Women's Association and several other groups and individuals as part of a nation-wide protest against the “unjust conviction” of Dr. Sen. A large number...

For some reason, governments - as well as the development ''industry'' as a whole - have always had a tendency to look for universal panaceas, particular silver bullets that will solve all or most of their implementation problems and somehow achieve the development project for them. The latest such initiative bullet that seems to have been accepted as a silver bullet is the Unique Identification Project, which is now seen...

The Supreme Court on Monday asked Attorney-General G.E. Vahanvati to produce in a sealed cover a copy of the complaint received against corporate lobbyist Niira Radia, which formed the basis for the Income-Tax Department to tap her telephonic conversations.A Bench comprising Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly said this to the A-G after perusing the Centre's counter-affidavit in the petition filed by industrialist Ratan Tata, alleging that the publication of...