KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

Medianama The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) floated a second tender in December 2022 for implementation and maintenance of a Master Data Management and de- duplication tool for a State Family Database (SFDB) project. The objective is to assign the ‘Makkal ID’— a unique identification number already allotted to the state’s seven crore residents— to different records across departments. The SFDB is projected to be the “single source of truth” of all...

-Newslaundry The Government of India has removed exemptions for journalistic work from data protection obligations in the fourth iteration of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022. If this iteration is passed as law a story containing Personal Data may result in journalists having to prove to a data protection board that their story was in the public interest, Newslaundry reported. The three previous versions - in 2018, 2019 and 2021...

-Hindustan Times According to their website, 126 facial recognition systems have been installed across various states. The facial recognition system which chief minister M K Stalin launched last year for police to identify criminals has stirred a controversy after a Chennai motorist tweeted about being checked at night, sparking concerns over collecting Personal Data and the right to privacy. On December 8, a Twitter user, Siddharth, tweeted to the Chennai police and traffic...

-Medianama.com Due to issues related to their Aadhaar data, 59 lakh school students in Maharashtra may lose out on availing mid-day meal services. 59 lakh school students in Maharashtra may lose out on availing services such as mid-day meals, and free uniforms and books due to issues related to their Aadhaar data, according to a report by the Hindustan Times. Of these, over 19 lakh students in the state do not have...