Two key issues Budget-2011 is seen as having failed to address are inflation and mass hunger. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced in his budget speech that the long-promised National Food Security Bill would be moved in Parliament “during the course of this year” but failed to make any financial allocation to back up this statement. Against the backdrop of fresh warnings by experts that the outlook is grim given the...

The Union budget writes off Rs.240 crore in corporate income tax every single day on average — the same amount leaves India each day in illicit fund flows to foreign banks. In six years from 2005-06, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore — more than twice the 2G fraud — in successive Union budgets. The figure has grown every single year for which data are...

RTI activists are angry with the state government for having appointed three commissioners to the Tamil Nadu Information Commission just before the model code of conduct came into force, with zero transparency. The government announced the appointments on Tuesday, hours before the election commission announced the poll date. Already, the appointment of former chief secretary KS Sripathi as the chief information commissioner is in a legal tangle after RTI activists...

Protesting against the states land acquisition programme, farmers from nine villages near the IMT, decided on Sunday that they would organize a mass demonstration near the Parliament house in New Delhi on the March 2. More than a thousand people from over 50 villages of the nearby region are expected to participate in the demonstration. The controversial land acquisition issue has already been forwarded to the chief minister of state,...

A Delhi court has asked the CBI and the Delhi police to file a detailed report on the action taken by them so far on the complaints about alleged corruption in the Commonmwealth Games-related casess. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Amit Bansal, on a petition filed by RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal, Swami Agnivesh, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, Yoga guru Baba Ramdev and others, has directed the CBI''s Anti-Corruption Branch and the...