-The Hindu   The services will enable transfer, application procedures to be brought to one's door Last Christmas Eve, 35 people in a remote village of Jharkhand received a unique present. They became the first Indians to access their Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme bank accounts on their doorstep, having had their identities authenticated through their Aadhaar numbers. They are among the earliest beneficiaries of the next phase of the ambitious —...

-The Hindustan Times By cancelling licences issued by the UPA government to telecommunications companies in 2008, the Supreme Court has ruled against discretion in the allotment of natural resources like radio frequencies. This is in contrast to the view of this government and that of its predecessor, the NDA, that big upfront costs like spectrum fees, which must be passed on to customers, don’t serve the larger goal of universal telecom...

Sending a clear message that the 2G spectrum allocation of 2008 is a scam and not the result of a government policy decision, the Supreme Court today quashed the grant of 122 UAS licences and allocation of spectrum to 12 private companies. Even as the trial in the 2G case progresses in a Patiala House trial court in Delhi, a bench of Justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly held...

-The Telegraph   Meals daily, so will be the “feedback”. Come June, the principals and headmasters of 12 lakh government primary schools in the country will have to inform the Centre on a daily basis through their mobile phones whether they have served mid-day meals. The HRD ministry will start an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) under which the headmasters and principals will get messages or calls on their mobiles. “The cellphones of the principals...

School girls in bright red uniforms troop down the slope in groups of threes and fours in Koppa, the fertile sugarcane town in southern Karnataka’s agricultural district of Mandya. A teenage boy on a motorcycle does the dim-and-dip with his headlights, the equivalent of a wink, as he passes the girls on his way up the slope in what seems to be a strut on a motorcycle. “Television and mobile phones...