-The Times of India The Anna Hazare-led civil society movement cannot be faulted for having come up with its version of the Lokpal Bill, because otherwise it would have been accused of campaigning for something essentially negative - the withdrawal of the flawed government version without putting forward an alternative. Frustration with everyday corruption - as well as the spectacular kind that explodes in the public sphere ever so often (...
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State land maps locked in Bihar by Suman K Shrivastava
Eleven years after birth, Jharkhand is still staggering under the oppressive weight of multi-crore land scams — one of the most ignoble pulled off in the capital and the latest unearthed in temple district Deoghar — and it squarely blames Big Brother Bihar for this physical handicap. As many as 82,000 land maps belonging to the state are gathering dust at the Gulzarbag Printing Press in Patna, leaving ample scope for...
More »Starving India may get the Bill but not the food by Apoorva Dutt
Long promised by the UPA government, the food security Bill will be tabled in parliament in December this year. However, the National Advisory Council (NAC), which drafted the proposal, is tussling with the government over the “dilution and misdirection” of the Bill. The final Bill diverges from the original NAC draft on key issues: adoption of alternatives to the PDS such as cash transfers, the risk of inflation due to...
More »Need to review parliamentary privilege: Aruna Roy
-The Hindu Civil rights activist Aruna Roy on Sunday termed the notion of parliamentary privilege ‘fundamentally flawed' and said it needed a relook. “The privilege issue, we [the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI)] feel, is fundamentally flawed. We will have to examine it. Not only now, we have raised this over a number of issues [earlier],” she said at an interaction with the media. On Parliament's breach of privilege motion...
More »Mamata approves draft land bill, but with rider
-The Asian Age West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, whose party Trinamul Congress is the key ally of the Congress, on Saturday gave her approval to the draft of the new Land Acquisition Amendment Bill, but with a rider. She wanted the Centre to give “a free hand” to the state government to introduce and implement a land acquisition law of its own. She made this announcement after a meeting Union rural...
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