The union government under its ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme has decided to use the Aadhaar number as a “digital identity” for the purpose of mobile banking. The Aadhaar number would be linked with the mobile number as well as the bank account number of the individual. The announcement was made by the secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government…
The decades old `Wangiri fraud’, in which conmen lure people using suggestive pictures to entice them to ring up premium numbers, has surfaced in a new format in the city. In the past one week, dozens of Kochiites have been receiving missed calls from numbers beginning with +225 and +381, traced back to the Ivory…
Riyadh: A woman who co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network Internet discussion group with blogging activist Raef Badawi has been freed after about three months in prison, her daughter said on Sunday.
Suad al-Shammari had spent around 90 days at a women`s prison in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, her daughter Sarah al-Rimaly told AFP.
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One of Narendra Modi’s key promises in the run-up to the 2014 national election that enthused voters and investors alike was the mantra of “minimum government, maximum governance”. But with a jumbo-sized cabinet and a finance ministry that seems to favour scale expansion as a counter-cyclical strategy to drive growth, Modi has found it difficult…
Kerala is all set for a giant leap in e-Governance. Following in the footsteps of states like Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Karnataka, the state will form a Virtual IT cadre to conceptualise, implement and manage e-Governance projects. The idea is to build a team through internal selection from skilled and qualified employees within departments and to…
The Modi government, which never tires of swearing by an impending digital revolution, needs to pull up its socks if the current status of the National Optical Fibre Network is anything to go by. The dream of bringing broadband services to 2.5 lakh gram panchayats across India is still far from being realised with the…
After adopting villages with the aim of turning them into models of development, the government now wants to adopt panchayats and make their functioning fully digital. These panchayats, selected from 10 states, will perform all functions — from planning, accounting and service delivery like issuance of certificates, licenses — online. “It has now been decided…
The union minister of state (independent charge) for skill development, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, recently said that India’s skilled workforce is 2%, compared to over 75% in all major economies. In this backdrop, the government us working on a new skill development policy to address shortcomings of the existing policy. Although skill development can improve “employment-readiness”,…
A two-hour drive from Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s administrative heartland, is the small, nondescript hamlet of Akodara in Sabarkantha district. With a population of just 1,054 as per the 2011 census, the primary occupation of villagers here is farming and dairy. What has catapulted this progressive little village on to the national map as a model for…
With urban India, the world’s largest middle-class population, now deciphered and more or less conquered, it is time to tap into what could be the world’s last and the largest untapped markets – ’emerging India’. While urban India was a difficult market to crack, rural India will be nothing short of an enigma. On one side is…