Should the Central government run schools, crèches, pre-schools, dispensaries, employment schemes, the buying and selling of food grains, and build houses, not to speak of selling milk as it does in Delhi? Though the states seem to have taken it as their fate to have schemes on state subjects like education, agriculture and so on tailored for them by the Centre, as if in distrust of the states’ capability to think...

The Pune police are in the process of setting up a three-member committee to supervise protection provided to Right to Information Act (RTI) activists as per a recent direction of the home department. Following the brutal murder of RTI activist Satish Shetty in Talegaon Dabhade on January 13, 2010, the issue of protection of RTI activists had come to the fore. The state government had issued a government resolution (GR) on...

The Embassy cable suggests a serious crime was committed on Indian soil to which U.S. diplomats were privy. The Prime Minister cannot cite lame arguments to justify inaction. Since politics is a distraction, consider the following retelling of the WikiLeaks tale. An activist dies in a traffic accident. CCTV footage from a bank nearby suggests he might have been murdered but the case is never investigated properly. Three years later,...

Thousands of workers from the state employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will protest outside Parliament on March 30. The members,of the NREGA worker union from Punjab, allege widespread corruption in the scheme and poor working conditions. “NREGA was implemented from April 1, 2008. As per rules, job cards should have been made by that time, but even now many workers are running from pillar to...

There is a fundamental inequality in the governance arrangement in New Delhi that continues to plague the United Progressive Alliance. Members of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council feel they have the right to criticise the government and its functionaries all the time, while no one in government is willing to return the compliment. In an interview to this newspaper, (March 13) the self-proclaimed father of India’s green...