-The Telegraph New Delhi: Prakash Javadekar's human resource development ministry has failed to back up with details his four-month-old claim that Aadhaar-linkage had helped the government identify 80,000 "ghost lecturers'' at colleges and universities. Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan had moved separate Right to Information applications on the subject. Bhardwaj had sought the state-wise break-up of the "ghost lecturers", their names and those of the colleges and universities...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...

-The Hindu Petitions have challenged constitutional validity of Aadhaar and its enabling 2016 law The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its verdict on a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar and its enabling 2016 law after a marathon 38-day hearing that spanned four months. A five-judge Constitution Bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.K. Sikri, A.M. Khanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan heard the argument of all the...

-The Indian Express Bill Gates’s claim that it raises no privacy concerns is misleading. Crucial issues that have to do with confidentiality of data and state surveillance are at stake. According to Bill Gates, privacy is not a concern with Aadhaar (‘Aadhaar doesn’t pose any privacy issue, says Bill Gates’, IE, May 3). This widely-quoted statement would have been more convincing if Gates had shown a clear understanding of the Aadhaar project....

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Hackers appear to have stolen data from the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which manages over Rs 8.5 lakh crore in pension funds, by burrowing through an Aadhaar seeding platform. The EPFO tried to play down the seriousness of the data hack by suggesting that the data busters hadn't managed to break into its servers but had exploited certain vulnerabilities in a gateway which is managed by CSC...