-The Times of India The national project to give unique identity numbers to all Indians, and enable welfare payments electronically, is now facing a snub from the very part of the government that funds it, and has been its most staunch supporter so far: The finance ministry. Two moves initiated by the banking division in the finance ministry over the past three months appear to duplicate and bypass the work being done...
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Study Shows Unique ID’s Reach to India’s Poor-Amol Sharma
When India embarked on its “unique ID” project in the fall of 2010, pledging to distribute unique 12-digit numbers to 1.2 billion people, the hope was that hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t have a passport, driver’s license or other credible identity document would get one – and with it, a ticket to essential government and private sector services. A new survey led by Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New...
More »Debate on poverty does not alter the reality of declining poverty or strategy to combat it-PP Sangal
The Planning Commission drew flak when it calculated that if an urban person spent 28 per head every day and someone in rural areas spent 22, that was enough to consider them to be above the poverty line. These figures are based on consumption expenditure data collected in the 66th round of NSSO for 2009-10. From these new estimates, using the Tendulkar Committee methodology, the number of poor in 2009-10 was...
More »Karnataka's BPO for RTI in limbo-Pradeesh Chandran
The government’s ambitious plan for setting up a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre for RTI filing is in a limbo as the company which won the bid has had no communication since winning the bid. The government was planning to set up a BPO for the process in Bangalore through which the general public could file petitions under the Right to Information Act. The project, which was expected to be...
More »Delhi's irony: Urban Poverty-Srinand Jha
Each time 25 year old Salma takes her one year old son Zubair to the Batla Clinic (a private clinic in Delhi) for a shot of the DPT, the cost of transportation and the vaccine adds up to approximately Rs.500. When it is time for Zubair to take the next immunization dose, Salma may find that the expenses have entirely spiraled out of her reach. New vaccines and expensive brands of baby...
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