-The Indian Express In spite of attempts to dress it as one, Aadhaar bill is not a money bill. The issue of bills being categorised as money bills in an attempt to circumvent the Rajya Sabha has once again become live. On Friday, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley asserted was a money bill....

-The Telegraph Chennai: Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) has agreed to compensate nearly 600 former employees who were exposed to toxic mercury in a thermometer factory that had been relocated from New York to Tamil Nadu by another investor in 1984 following environmental concerns in the US. The thermometer factory is located at Kodaikanal, around 430km from here. The plant was shut down in 2011 after Greenpeace activists found mercury waste in the...

-The Indian Express Giving this information to the media here on Tuesday, D V Sadananda Gowda claimed that transparency “can be achieved even without it”. In a setback to transparency in higher judiciary, the Central government has decided against bringing appointments to the higher judiciary under the RTI Act’s purview. Giving this information to the media here on Tuesday, Union Law Minister D V Sadananda Gowda claimed that transparency “can be achieved...

-The Indian Express Central allocations for agriculture are less important than the state budgets. I took the night train to Delhi to participate in budget-day discussions and my co-passenger, who boarded the train in ravaged Punjab, asked me a simple question: “50 farmers are committing suicide everyday; will the budget end farmer suicides?” My answer was — and still is — “No.” The Union budget is just the government’s bookkeeping exercise...

-Business Standard The government could introduce a regulatory framework to ensure that the biometric details of citizens it collects is kept discreet and used only to generate Aadhaar numbers or authenticate them. The Aadhaar Bill, which could be introduced in the Lok Sabha on Thursday, is likely to introduce this regulatory framework. It could also to propose that in cases of national security, an officer not below the rank of a joint...