AK Shukla, arrested on Sunday night, has been charged with criminal conspiracy In a fresh twist to the infamous CMO murder case, which is alleged to be linked to the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam in Uttar Pradesh, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Sunday night arrested the former Chief Medical Officer of Lucknow, A. K. Shukla. He has been charged with criminal conspiracy to eliminate Vinod Kumar...

The chattering classes of urban India are engaged in animated discussions about Didi, scams, policy paralysis , faltering reforms and declining growth. Meanwhile, the farming classes, who haven't seen much reform since the Green Revolution 50 years ago, continue to combine bits of modern technology with their ingenious capacity for 'jugaad' in transforming traditional agriculture. Here are a few examples. The tractor displaced the bullock in ploughing and other farm operations....

Alarmed by its proactive role, the three ‘pillars’ of our democracy set out to weaken the fourth estate Fundamentalisms do not necessarily announce their arrival by banging a hammer on our heads. Freedoms are often lost in little steps. The process creeps in quietly but insidiously. The path is often complex and defies a simple narrative. But here’s a straightforward fact: a concerted attempt is being made to censor, control...

-The Telegraph A CBI court today convicted 34 accused in one of the 53 fodder scam cases registered with it, awarding rigorous imprisonment sentences ranging from one to six years and slapping fines between Rs 10,000 to Rs 3 lakh. The court of CBI special judge II, D.C. Roy, found all the accused guilty of fraudulently withdrawing money from the Doranda treasury between 1980-90 with the help of fake invoices. The case (RC...

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh exhorted the bureaucracy to be fearless, saying, "Civil servants should fight the tendency of not taking decisions because of the fear that things might go wrong and they might be penalized for that." The PM was just the latest to express concern about increasing bureaucratic stasis-foreign visitors have remarked upon it and even TOI has written about it earlier. But his words have clearly failed...