The tribal people of Chhattisgarh are in an extremely dangerous situation, caught as they are between the state forces and the Maoists. THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in Delhi on October 4 on charges of acting as a conduit between the Essar group and the Maoists, the former accused of giving “protection money” to the latter. On October 7, she moved the Delhi High Court to...

Sonia Gandhi’s ambitious plan to institutionalise political monitoring of the government’s flagship programmes in states has taken off in a tentative and haphazard manner. Although she has appointed a separate Congress general secretary, Vilas Muttemwar, to oversee the monitoring system and asked all state party units to set up committees to study the implementation of the schemes, little has been achieved in the past 10 months. Many state units are yet...

Five days after Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi accused Mayawati government in UP of mega-scale corruption in the centrally sponsored schemes, union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has shot off a letter to UP chief minister Mayawati citing a huge scam in the MNREGA scheme in the state. According to sources, Jairam has specifically mentioned seven districts Balrampur, Gonda, Mahoba, Sonbhadra, Sant Kabir Nagar and Mirzapur where central funds have...

The UPA is pressing ahead with the National Food Security Bill for the Cabinet despite agriculture minister Sharad Pawar's public criticism of UPA's flagship programme. The first draft, which was put up for public consultation including inputs from state governments, is being revised to reflect the political priorities of the Congress. Even as the government gives final shape to the bill it will take to the Cabinet, the debate within the government...

Pilot survey under Project Dipankar in four prosperous districts shows 87 per cent class I students of government schools are undernourished Eighty-seven per cent school children in four districts of West Bengal are undernourished right at the entry level. The shocking numbers are from the yet unpublished report of Project Dipankar, a child tracking system initiated by the department of school education in the state. The project tracks the educational performance...