-The Hindu Chief Justice Misra asks why people preferring anonymity are also compelled to part with their personal data to access services. The government has assured the Supreme Court that Aadhaar is not a “fly-by-night effort to score some brownie points” and personal data collected from millions of people is safe from breach in storage facilities barricaded behind five-feet thick walls. Appearing before a Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court directs that public servants can only be arrested with the written permission of their appointing authority. The anti-atrocities law, which protects Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from casteist slurs and discrimination, has become an instrument to “blackmail” innocent citizens and public servants, the Supreme Court observed in a judgment on Tuesday. Issuing a slew of guidelines to protect public servants and private employees from arbitrary arrests under the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre on Wednesday will start countering a mountain of legal issues heaped against Aadhaar in the Supreme Court by numerous petitioners in the last two months, primarily focussing on violation of individual’s right to privacy through collection and storage of biometric data. During 19 days of arguments spanning two months since it began on January 17, senior advocates Shyam Divan, Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Gopal...

-The Indian Express The demand is a call for upholding local practices of belonging On March 12, about 50,000 farmers reached Mumbai, walking 165 km in the hope that their elected representatives would listen when they spoke. A majority of these farmers were Adivasis and one of their demands was the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and through it, their land rights. The FRA was enacted in 2006 with the...

-The Hindu Business Line The SC interim order presents the biometric ID as a fait accompli for the underprivileged Last week’s interim order of the Supreme Court on a batch of petitions challenging Aadhaar may have provided temporary relief to a section of the population, but it appears to have simultaneously served notice on another section – a largely disadvantaged one — that the contentious biometric identification is something of a fait...