-The Hindu On most days, Central government staff work for eight hours The occasional surprise checks by Union Ministers to see if government employees are reporting to work on time may not have brought in 100 per cent compliance, but employees aren't as late to office as widely perceived. The Hindu got exclusive access to one week of Central government attendance data, thanks to the first publicly available Database of employees, and found...

-Press Information Bureau Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has enrolled one-fourth of the Uttar Pradesh population having generated more than five crore Aadhaar numbers against a population of 19.95 Crore of Uttar Pradesh (as per Census 2011). UIDAI crossed the Five Crore mark in Uttar Pradesh this week in its second phase, which was started for residents of Uttar Pradesh through various non-State registrars (Banks, NSDL, et al) and their...

-The Hindu Chennai: After deliberations internally and with the Union government for months, the Tamil Nadu government has taken another step towards end-to-end computerisation of the public distribution system (PDS) by floating bids to select a system integrator. The firm chosen will have to implement a computerisation project. It has to design, commission and operate and maintain a solution, besides managing it for five years. The Database for the system will be...

-The Hindu Delay by States in specifying fresh criteria and completing verification More than a year after the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed, beneficiaries are yet to be identified as States have delayed specifying fresh criteria and completing verification. Even the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), which was proposed in 2011 as a comprehensive survey to identify socio-economic characteristics of the poor and to be used to identify NFSA beneficiaries, is...

-The Indian Express More than four years after the RTE was passed, the state has no handle on the numbers of out-of-school children. The recently released report of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children, based on a situational analysis of India, opens a Pandora's box on data and methodological issues that plague the estimation of out-of-school children in India. As the report reveals, there is a multiplicity of definitions, sources of data...