-The Economic Times Imagine a rural family of five. Mom. Dad. Two kids. And Grandma. Assume too that they are below the poverty line. The day is coming when this family will have to give its biometrics out to myriad agencies. You know that Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or the Registrar General's National Population Register (NPR) has been collecting biometrics for a while now. But a set of other...
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Burdwan: 16 farmer suicides in one year despite bumper rice crop-Priyanka Gupta
-IBN Burdwan: Burdwan may be the Rice Bowl of Bengal. However, its farmers are committing suicide. Here, rice is not a source of prosperity but of anguish. Spiralling debt has reportedly driven 16 farmers here to commit suicide in the past one year. Fifty-four-year-old Amiya Saha was one such farmer. The memories haunt his wife, but what hurts more is the continued government denials that something is amiss here. Says Jayanta Saha, a...
More »TISS report points to anti-Muslim bias of police-Meena Menon
-The Hindu “Most of prisoners in Maharashtra jails victims of prejudice” A report on Muslim prisoners in Maharashtra jails by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) establishes that most of them do not have connections with criminal gangs, and points to an acute bias of the police for arresting them in some cases only because they belong to a particular community. A Study of the Socio Economic Profile and Rehabilitation Needs of...
More »Complex system of patronage, corruption blunts India’s efforts to help the poor out of poverty-Minhaz Merchant
-The Economic Times The Rae Bareli seat in Uttar Pradesh has been a Gandhi family bastion since 1967 when Indira Gandhi first stood for election from there. Sonia Gandhi adopted the constituency in 2004 and was re-elected with a huge majority in 2009. It should, therefore, be one of India's most developed districts. Right? Wrong. The Hunger and Malnutrition, or HUNGaMA, survey, released by the Prime Minister earlier this year, was...
More »Rio+20 Earth Summit: campaigners decry final document-Jonathan Watts and Liz Ford
-The Guardian 'Pathway for a sustainable future' declared, but Greenpeace says summit was failure of epic proportions Amid doubt, disappointment and division, the world's governments came together in Rio on Friday to declare "a pathway for a sustainable century". At the close of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, heads of state and ministers from more than 190 nations signed off on a plan to set global sustainable development goals and other measures to...
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