The government is likely to accept most of the recommendations of Sonia Gandhi-LED National Advisory Council (NAC) on the proposed food security law despite warnings that the suggestions would add to subsidy burden, increase dependence on imports and distort the country's food economy. The food ministry has set out plans that are in line with the NAC's proposal to widen the scope of the legislation, which seeks to provide legal...
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Near-consensus on no-fail policy by Alexandre Moniz Barbosa
Educationists are questioning the retrospective nature of the no-fail policy that was made applicable to schools in Goa earlier this month through a circular, days after the results of the last academic year had been declared. While there appears to be a near consensus that the policy will be beneficial, the haste with which the directorate of education (DoE) is implementing this, is leading to various questions being raised. "It...
More »It’s bloomtime now by Shashi Tharoor & Keerthik Sasidharan
In the 1920s, a young Tamil girl sang and starred in her school musical. It was, ostensibly, a private event with few outsiders. Yet so exceptional was her singing that Swadesamitran ran her photograph and wrote about the event. Seeing that photo in the newspaper, her household “was appalLED” for, as the music historian V Sriram writes, “good, chaste women never had their photographs published in papers”. Today, this seems like...
More »Revoke the Illegal Clearance to the POSCO Project
-Mainstream Weekly DEMAND AT PRESS CONFERENCE IN NEW DELHI A press conference was held in New Delhi on May 4, 2011 to protest against the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest’s “final clearance” to the POSCO project in Odisha. The following is the press release issued by the POSCO Pratirodh Solidarity (PPS-Delhi) in association with NFFPFW, CSD, NAPM, INSAF, and others at the press conference. The ‘final forest clearance’ by the Ministry...
More »India's unwanted girls by Geeta Pandey
India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has LED to this crisis. Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16. In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her...
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