-PTI NEW DELHI: Social activist Aruna Roy has decided not to continue in UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi-led NAC after her term expires on Friday, criticising the government for not taking up recommendations of the council on minimum wages to workers under MGNREGA. Roy has written to Gandhi requesting that she should not be considered for another term of NAC that sets the social agenda for the government and the UPA Chairperson has...
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From Bofors to 2G, the same fate-Arun Kumar
-The Hindu The parliamentary committees on the howitzer scam and the stock market scandal protected the powerful and failed to fix accountability. The same is true in the spectrum case The current political situation brings back memories of 1989. The Prime Minister then was under a cloud in the Bofors scam. Many of his close associates like Lalit Suri and Ajitabh Bachchan were accused of wrong-doing. Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and...
More »Death in parched farm field reveals growing India water tragedy -Rakteem Katakey, Rajesh Kumar Singh and Archana Chaudhary
-Live Mint/ Bloomberg Conflicts between industry and farmers getting worse as water becomes more and more scarce Sachin Ingale slipped out of his family's two-room, white-painted mud hut about 4pm and walked into their farm field where the 22-year-old took a deep swig of pesticide from a plastic bottle. He died later that evening. Four months later, the mercury is pushing 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in his village in...
More »Reverse gear on electoral reforms -Jagdeep S Chhokar
-Live Mint Electoral reforms are not the forte of law ministers. But they can avoid damaging a battered system The resignation of Ashwani Kumar as law minister has brought cheer to a group of people who do not have much to do, at least directly, with the coal block allocation controversy. These are people working on electoral reforms. This is because ever since becoming law minister, Kumar had been consistent in his...
More »Kalahandi: from hunger deaths to a rice revolution -Chetan Chauhan
-The Hindustan Times Odisha's Kalahandi district - once the cause of global embarrassment for India due to its high number of starvation deaths - today stands tall with a five-fold increase in its rice production since 1999, figures reveal. The agriculture ministry's recent crop data ranks Kalahandi among the top 25 rice producing districts of India. The three-year average of its rice production ending 2010-11 was 468,000 tonnes, compared with a three-year...
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