-The Telegraph   New laws are often brought in without assessing their judicial and financial impact. The result is poor implementation, says Seetha Call it collateral damage. According to newspaper reports, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has written to the Prime Minister asking for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to be put on hold during the peak season of agricultural operations. With a guaranteed income of Rs 100 a day for at...

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...

-The United Nations   Corruption caused by weak governance is leading to unequal land distribution and poor resource management, according to a United Nations report released today, which argues that this lack of transparency is undermining social stability, investment and growth in developing countries. Weak land governance occurs as a result of low levels of transparency, accountability and the rule of law, the report says, which strains “the rules, processes and institutions that...

-ANI The statistics for farmer suicides in India are as striking as they are shameful. One farmer suicide every 30 minutes in 2009, screamed a NYU School of Law report earlier this year. If one accepts that many suicides also go unreported, even this shocking statistics is perhaps an under-estimation. Why, then, would another three suicides, this time in Madhya Pradesh's Hoshangabad District, be newsworthy? For one, the suicides took place during the...

-The Deccan Herald   Farmers have demanded a compensation of Rs 50 lakh per acre for their land notified for acquisition by the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB) for the Vemgal Industrial Area in the taluk. V R Sudarshan, MLC, who submitted a memorandum to Deputy Commissioner Manoj Kumar Meena on Monday, said the KIADB should leave no room for controversy in the process of acquiring the land. He said the KIADB had offered...