-The Hindu By abdicating its responsibility to conduct the caste census and turning it into a poverty-cum-caste survey, the previous dispensation at the Centre made the exercise casual and perfunctory. This has been proved by the way the survey has turned out. In August 2010, Finance Minister and head of the Group of Ministers, Pranab Mukherjee, made a reassuring statement in Parliament on behalf of the government of India, that there would...

-The Indian Express SCOPE seeks list of ‘habitual seekers of queries’ from public sector enterprises, former CIC says existing RTI law does not allow such segregation Central public sector companies are trying to identify people who repeatedly use the Right to Information (RT) route to ferret out information from them. Companies are trawling their records about such people and will match data to draw up a checklist. And they plan to use...

-The Hindu Urban planning that involves the people and alternative service providers gives far better results than top-down efforts from the government, finds an IIT-M study In Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, the responsibility of managing and maintaining a set of more than 160 community toilets was handed over by the Tiruchirapalli City Corporation to a federation of women self-help groups. A post-programme field survey of 803 households revealed that the community participation had...

-The Indian Express The Rural Development Ministry has washed its hands of the matter while the RGI too seems reluctant to claim ownership. Amid growing demands to release the caste figures compiled as part of the Socio Economic and Caste Census, various government authorities having been passing the buck to one another. Officials have been saying the caste data, compiled from the first such census since 1931, is part of a...

-The Hindu Chennai: The Central government has recently set State-wise tentative targets for installation of grid-connected solar rooftop systems as part of its plan to achieve 40,000 MW of rooftop solar power by 2022. Under the plan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh are expected to add higher capacities at 4,700 MW and 4,300 MW, respectively. Tamil Nadu and Gujarat have been given a target of 3,500 MW and 3,200 MW, respectively. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh,...