A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance is set to recommend that the government withdraw the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010, reports India Today, citing unnamed sources. The recommendation is to withdraw the bill and introduce another one, because members of the standing committee found the project directionless, and that the bill and the project are not acceptable in their present form, the report states. It doesn’t quite mention...

Aruna Roy-led National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) has criticized the exclusion of lower bureaucracy from the draft Lokpal bill terming it as a loss for the common man. It has also demanded that the CBI should be brought out of the administrative control of the government for it to be effective in tackling corruption. The activists have echoed concerns already raised by Team Anna which has demanded...

-The Times of India   Anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare has returned centrestage, though armed with a political and electoral agenda this time. He has warned the ruling Congress that he will campaign against it in five states going to polls next year - unless the government adopts the Jan Lokpal Bill in Parliament's forthcoming winter session. The Gandhian seems to have abandoned his earlier non-political stance, now identifying the Congress as a...

The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...

The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill is a first step towards granting functional autonomy to the country's nuclear regulator. THE true independence and functional autonomy of the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been questioned for long. The issue gained further importance in recent months after it was raised in many quarters in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March in Japan. To allay public fears as...