Troubles continue for the government's dream project Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Already battling a staff crunch, its request for Rs 7,000 crore to roll out 60 crore UID numbers in the first phase has been shot down by the Empowered Finance Committee (EFC). "The EFC is understood to have refused to entertain the request of the UIDAI for Rs 7,000 crore to execute the first phase of the ambitious...

To eliminate misuse and leakages from its flagship rural employment programme, India could introduce biometric-aided identity checks that can be verified remotely. The government’s initiative comes at a time when the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has been criticized for leakages. It is the government’s largest social sector spending programme with allocation for this fiscal pegged at Rs40,100 crore. The proposal, which has already been submitted to the government for...

A pilot survey will be launched next month to assess the number of the poor in the country on a new set of parameters ahead of the scheduled BPL census in April 2011. The government has decided to launch the pilot project in 260 villages across the country to test the parameters suggested by a former Planning Commission member amid a debate on the best way of doing such counts. The project,...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

In the hierarchy of sins, robbing the poorest of the poor is right up there. That is what the holders of the 11.28 lakh fake ration cards in Madhya Pradesh are guilty of. By state government estimates, these duplicates constitute 16 per cent of all ration cards in the state. Since the Below Poverty Line and Antyodaya (meant for the very poorest) cards entitle holders to essential food commodities such...