The co-chairperson of the Joint Drafting Committee on the Lokpal Bill, Shanti Bhushan, has urged Union Finance Minister and chairman of the Lokpal panel Pranab Mukherjee to treat the two drafts as the outcome of the joint committee and not to treat the Team Anna draft as a “dissent note.” In a letter to Mr. Mukherjee, Mr. Bhushan took exception to Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily's statement calling the government draft...
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Sparring partners by Nandini Sundar
Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...
More »Donors shun water projects by Fiona Harvey
More than one billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...
More »PM remote-controlled on Lokpal, says Anna by Manjiri Damle
Anna Hazare on Tuesday said PM Manmohan Singh has kept mum on the issue of including the PM in the Lokpal ambit because "there is a remote control on him". Speaking to reporters, Hazare said, "Personally, I don't think Manmohan Singh is scared to come in the Lokpal ambit. But then, there is a remote control on him. I recently wrote a letter to him asking him why he did not...
More »Food Minister gives nod to export of wheat, rice
-Express News Service Having resisted the export of foodgrain since taking charge in January, Food Minister K V Thomas on Wednesday said that he was not opposed to export of “some quantity of wheat and rice” as there is bumper production in the country. Thomas’s statement holds significance as he has been publicly speaking against foodgrain export, citing the proposed food security law. “Our department is not negative to the idea of...
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