-PTI   Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh today suggested the Rajasthan government to implement Banking Correspondent (BC) Model in the state for payment to MGNREGA workers in time. Ramesh, while attending a meeting with Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Minister Bharat Singh and social activist Aruna Roy, he said delay or late payment of wages discourages MGNREGA labourers and attributed this to absence of banks outside district headquarters. He said the BC...

-The Times of India   With the National Food Security bill out of the way, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) will now take up issues like urban poverty, especially the vulnerable groups, and reforms in the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Area) Act on a priority basis. Sources said the NAC had already begun consultation on reforms in the PESA. The Act, which has been lying largely in a limbo,...

Prakash Karat has decided to share a dais with civil society activists Prashant Bhushan and Aruna Roy, stirring debate in the CPM which largely considers NGOs and their members “anti-Left” and accuses them of furthering the “imperialist strategy”. Some in the CPM believe the general secretary’s presence at the public meeting against corruption will amount to extending legitimacy to the “action groups”, the party’s name for voluntary organisations. Others, though, see Karat...

In a season when every self-styled warrior against corruption is trying to look for a new weapon to fight it, my guest today is Satyananda Mishra, Chief Information Commissioner—someone who has in his control the strongest of those weapons, the RTI. Actually when it all began, nobody thought it would be so effective. In a period of five-and-a-half years, it has touched the hearts and minds of people. The number of...

Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption has a curious side-effect. It has turned the spotlight on India's lack of pre-legislative transparency. We may accept or dismiss team Anna's Jan Lokpal draft but his movement — and the subsequent build-up of hope and betrayal — has unwittingly exposed the systemic opaqueness in which our laws are conceived, written, debated and passed. The Lokpal Bill 2011 is one among 67-odd bills listed as...