Just when they seem to be hurtling towards confrontation, Congress has successfully reached out to the Anna Hazare camp, persuading the civil society activists to appear before the standing committee on law and justice. Activist Arvind Kejriwal confirmed to TOI that he along with his colleagues have accepted the invite from the parliamentary panel led by Congress's Abhishek Singhvi and will attend the deliberations on Wednesday. Gandhian Anna Hazare, former law...

The Seed Bill 2010 -- which stayed in controversy because its initial draft seemed to favour agri-business rather than the farmer -- is now ready to get debated and passed in the current session of Parliament. Despite consultations, first in a Parliamentary Standing Committee and later in an all party meeting, a large number of farmers’ unions, opposition parties and civil society groups believe that the Bill fails to protect...

-PTI   The Lokpal Bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha last week, has been referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee for in-depth scrutiny. The bill has been sent by Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari to the Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances and Law and Justice which has been given three months to submit its report, a Parliament source said. Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi, who is a senior advocate, was only recently...

The government's decision to exclude the prime minister from the ambit of the lokpal contradicts the position taken by previous governments on this issue between 1989 and 2001, in their failed attempts to get the bill passed in Parliament. A look at the previous bills shows though the lokpal bill was introduced for the first time in Parliament in 1968, it was only in 1989, during the fifth unsuccessful attempt,...

The Lokpal Bill is in danger of skidding off the rails. As it is introduced in Parliament, eminent activist Aruna Roy tells Shoma Chaudhury why we should not rush into it. THE LOKPAL BILL is now being debated in Parliament, almost 40 years after the idea was first mooted. Unfortunately, parented on one side by decades of wilful government inertia and, on the other, by the panicked hustle of ‘Team...