Bowing to pressure from the political leadership of the Congress, the government will consider making food security universal, but at a higher price for the rich. Food security was an electoral promise of the Congress before the 2009 polls, but the initial draft of the Bill said that it would apply only to the poor. After Congress president Sonia Gandhi refused to accept the Bill in that form, an empowered group...

Activist Gopal Krishna makes a case that the Unique Identification Number project is a gross violation of fundamental human rights and points out that a similar project/law in Britain is going to be repealed. This is with reference to a privacy invasion project which is relevant to India and all the democratic countries of the world. The very first bill that is to be presented by the UK's new coalition...

All 10 fingerprints, an iris scan and a photograph of the person will be used for unique identification (UID) of individuals, the cabinet committee on UID decided on Tuesday, giving its in-principle clearance to guidelines for setting up the UID database. In a billion-plus population, a mix of biometric and photographic record is considered necessary to ensure fidelity of information collected in the project. With UID intended to help identify...

There may be succour in store for the exploited lot of `domestic workers' with a key government panel recommending that `placement agencies', which work as mediators in employment of helps, should be regulated. It has also decided that government should ask states to declare minimum wages for these workers. The panel said that the Shops and Commercial Establishments Act, 1953, should regulate placement agencies. If this is implemented, the agencies...

Nahrani, a 38-year-old in Lalitpur, a village 30km from Jhansi, has an all-too-familiar tale to tell: a recently deceased husband; the lack of a ration card which promises access to free or inexpensive food; and a village without water, power, schools or health centres. Not one child from the 50-odd families in this village goes to school. The menfolk are perennially drifting, looking for jobs. And no one has heard...