-The Economic Times blog Word has it that World Bank economists use “obviously fabricated” data from time to time. These are not Sitaram Yechury or Medha Patkar’s words, but those of Paul Romer, former chief economist of the World Bank, in a recent email exchange reported by Financial Times. Romer retracted them later, but this “may not end the controversy”, as The Economist mildly put it. This is not the first time...

-The Hindu Business Line The government must universalise social security pensions for the elderly, single women and persons with disabilities and also operationalise the maternity entitlement scheme at the earliest, says Reetika Khera, Associate Professor of Economics at IIT-Delhi. In an interview to BusinessLine, Khera argued against the use of Aadhaar for authentication of beneficiaries and said it has “no role in plugging leakages or in the identification of correct beneficiaries”....

-Economic and Political Weekly Aadhaar-based biometric authentication is now compulsory for most users of the public distribution system in Jharkhand. Based on a recent household survey, this paper examines various issues related to this measure, including exclusion problems, transaction costs, and its impact on corruption. The findings raise serious questions about the appropriateness of this technology for rural Jharkhand. Please click here to read more. ...

-The Hindu Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication does nothing in the battle against graft — there are better alternatives In a sickening way, October 2017 was like October 2002. Fifteen years ago, in Rajasthan’s Baran and Udaipur districts, there was a spate of starvation deaths. The government of the time made up fanciful stories to deny that the deaths had anything to do with hunger or government failure. In October 2017, the death of an 11-year-old...

-NDTV Jean Dreze's new book, a collection of essays called 'Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone', starts with a beautiful and moving description of what he sees from his office in Ranchi University at the crack of dawn: hundreds of informal sector coal-miners in Ranchi trudging miles with heavy loads of coal they have dug up, often from below the land from which they were forcibly displaced. Dreze quotes...