By Venkatesh Nayak* A few ago the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi made a blistering criticism of the Aadhaar project. He was addressing an election rally in my home town, Bengaluru, where the erstwhile Chief of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani is seeking to enter Parliament on an Indian National Congress ticket. Glad to know that a political heavy weight is openly opposing Aadhaar — a Government of India initiative to provide ‘proof of identity’ to the supposedly ‘identity-less’ 1.2 billion residents of the country. But there was a need to check the reality. After I emptied a glass of cold water in celebration (veggie version of the chilled bubbly spirit which is customary for such occasions) I decided to cross check how much, and how often, the Gujarat government under the chief ministership of Narendra Modi has opposed the roll out of Aadhaar in Gujarat. According to UIDAI website, Gujarat government officials hel

By Rohit Prajapati and S. Srinivasan* The GMERS Medical College and Hospital Valsad is an institute managed by the Gujarat Medical Education and Research Society and is affiliated to the Veer Narmad South Gujarat University. It is claimed in their website that “the institute is spread over 36 acres of lush green campus situated in the beautiful city of Valsad, South Gujarat. The nearest airport is Surat Airport which is 90 km and the nearest railway station is Valsad Railway station which is 2 km. The nearest hotel accommodation is in Daman. The campus houses college building, hospital building and residential quarters for the doctors, nursing staff and student’s hostel.” If you visit the website and then the physical site at the ground the picture is not just contradictory but it suggests that the authorities should immediately take action against the officers who gave the permission to start the MBBS college and they should be prosecuted for such a criminal act. We are attaching the

  By Rajiv Shah  Is the National Sample Survey (NSS) Organization, the statistical arm of the Government of India, seeking to play a “statistical fraud” by saying that overall Muslim poverty levels in rural Gujarat have gone down from 31 per cent in 2004-05 to 7.7 per cent in 2011-12? It would seem so if one looks at the NSS’ 2011-12 extremely small sample size for Gujarat’s OBC Muslims – just five households! Based on this sample size, the NSS’ unreleased report on monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) for socio-religious groups suggests that the OBC Muslims’ poverty rate went down from 40.5 to 1.9 per cent during the seven years. In the second week of March 2014, a few newspapers carried a report that Gujarat had emerged as one of the top states in India where poverty among Muslims in both rural and urban areas has declined drastically in the last seven years. This was reportedly brought to light by a high-level committee formed under the Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, Amita