The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance finds the UID project to be “conceptualised with no clarity” and “directionless”. THE Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has dealt a body blow to the Unique Identification (UID) project. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was set up under the Planning Commission by an executive order on January 28, 2009. The scheme involves the collection of demographic and biometric information to issue ID numbers to...

Police have booked former DMKlegislator B Ranganathan as the prime accused in the murder of a man who was fighting against land-grabbers in Avadi on the outskirts of Chennai.  S Bhuvaneswaran, 38, was hacked to death in the presence of his four-year-old daughter in Kolathur on Tuesday. Bhuvaneswaran had fiLED RTI applications to retrieve titles on about 18 acres of land belonging to his family and other acquaintances after the plots...

The Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka appears to be readying itself for a big fight, and this time it is over the Bhagavad Gita. A statement by Karnataka Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda, in which he said that the government was considering introducing the Gita in primary and secondary standards in school has drawn appreciation as well as flak in the state. Vicky Nanjappa reports. The issue had come up...

-The Timee of India   Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology (Capart) had given a grant of Rs 1 lakh to Anna Hazare-LED Hind Swaraj Trust (HST) for watershed development in three villages in 1999-2001 but more than 90% of the money was spent on honorarium, travelling, printing and stationery, the Supreme Court was told.  Responding to a PIL fiLED by advocate M L Sharma alleging that large amounts of...

Not only are the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats Extension to ScheduLED Areas Act routinely violated in Chhattisgarh, the adivasis are also short-changed on legislative representation and reservations in government jobs. As the state cedes land to capital while reducing the adivasis to an ornamental presence, there is increasing assertion of adivasi identity, born out of class predicaments and experiences of displacement as much as notions of indigeneity. Supriya Sharma...