-The Telegraph The CBI has sought the government’s permission to prosecute two IPS officers for alleged involvement in the 2007 Nandigram police firing in which 14 persons were killed. The investigating agency has also recommended disciplinary or departmental action against nine other officers, including one from the IAS and three from the IPS. A letter dated May 23, 2012, (memo number 2242A) and undersigned by CBI deputy inspector-general Arun Bothra reached the office...

India is setting up a Rs.5,000 crore credit guarantee fund to facilitate easy education loans to needy students by providing protection against defaults to banks. The move was endorsed at a meeting of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), the highest education advisory body to the government that comprises academicians, industry experts and state education ministers, human resource development (HRD) minister Kapil Sibal told reporters Wednesday. “CABE members endorsed the initiative to...

Call it a strategy to garner political support for passing pending key education Bills or a progressive measure to reduce caste bias in colleges and universities—the central government has put in place a set of rules that can possibly stop grants or cancel recognition of higher educational institutes engaging in such discrimination. The new rules set out by the University Grants Commission (UGC) aim to provide safeguards to students of reserved...

While the government wants India to tighten its belt, the Planning Commission can afford to, well, flush with cash.  On Wednesday, Commission chief Montek Singh Ahluwalia said that Rs 35 lakh spent on two toilets in his office was not public money down the drain.  Ahluwalia explained that these were not toilets, but "toilet complexes."  Each of these complexes can accommodate 10 people at a time. He did not specify whether taxpayers would...

-The Indian Express Jairam Ramesh’s criticism of NREGA highlights that a rights-based approach to poverty reduction cannot work without improving implementation The clamour for the right to social pensions is another attempt to deal with the Indian state’s inability to provide adequate social protection to its poorest citizens through targeted programmes. India’s vulnerable continue to be excluded from social safety nets. The multi-layered problems with social welfare schemes can be summarised in...