-The Times of India LUCKNOW: Breaking ranks with the other parties, the Samajwadi Party on Thursday said it favoured a mechanism of checks and balances for transparency in the functioning of the political parties. The SP was referring to the June 3, 2013, ruling of the chief information commissioner (CIC) that says political parties come under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Almost all national parties have opposed the CIC ruling. National...
More »SEARCH RESULT
What we need is not a food security Bill but a hunger elimination Act -Arvind Virmani
-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...
More »Bastar: How democracy lost a generation -Jaideep Hardikar
-The Telegraph Faraspal, Chhattisgarh: The Salwa Judum was a failure, both to its opponents and the man who was its face. "I shall repent the Salwa Judum's failure my entire life," Mahendra Karma had told a Dantewada journalist last year, months before being assassinated by the rebels last week. The 62-year-old tribal Congress leader wasn't referring to the extortion, murder and rape charges against the anti-Maoist militia - he considered them "collateral damage"...
More »High subsidy burden due to food bill exaggeration: Plan Com
-Moneycontrol.com The government had tried to get the Food bill passed in Lok Sabha in the recently-concluded Budget session, but the debate on the proposed legislation could not be concluded amid din. Planning Commission Member Abhijit Sen today termed it exaggeration, the likely huge rise in government's subsidy burden on account of implementing the proposed National Food Security Bill, as suggested in some quarters. Introduced in Parliament in 2011, the Food Bill, which...
More »UN report highlights benefits of school meal programmes in crisis settings
-The United Nations A United Nations report released today stresses the importance of providing meals for schoolchildren, particularly in times of crisis, and notes that this is still lacking in many developing countries. "School feeding assures that where quality education is available, children are able to take advantage of the opportunity to learn," said the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Ertharin Cousin. "It's an investment that pays off in the...
More »