One started reading the new Draft National Land Acquisition and Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill 2011 with expectations of a great improvement over the 2007 Bills. There are indeed some very good features in the new Bill but, on the whole, one must regretfully report disappointment. Let us see how the Bill deals with some of the key issues involved. (i) Acquisition of agricultural land: The Bill rules out the acquisition, not...
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UPA's image hit as corruption, scams rise by Yogendra Yadav
In this Independence Day week, State Of The Nation brings you an exclusive opinion poll across 20 states with 18,000 respondents. Corruption and scams are perhaps the biggest talking point at the moment and have clearly hurt the UPA Government. The results of the CNN-IBN-CNBC-TV18 State of the Nation Poll in association with Forbes India conducted by CSDS confirm what has been suspected - that the UPA's image has taken...
More »Skepticism Over India’s Anticorruption Bill by Lydia Polgreen
After a four-decade battle, Indian lawmakers took the first formal step toward creating an independent anticorruption agency on Thursday, introducing a bill in Parliament that would appoint a powerful ombudsman, or Lokpal, to investigate wrongdoing by government officials. But the draft of the law, which exempts the prime minister, members of Parliament and many other officials from the Lokpal’s jurisdiction, was roundly rejected by many of the people who had...
More »4 previous lokpal Bills had covered PM by Nagendar Sharma
The government's decision to exclude the prime minister from the ambit of the lokpal contradicts the position taken by previous governments on this issue between 1989 and 2001, in their failed attempts to get the bill passed in Parliament. A look at the previous Bills shows though the lokpal bill was introduced for the first time in Parliament in 1968, it was only in 1989, during the fifth unsuccessful attempt,...
More »CBI books Shukla, Sachan in NRHM scam; registers 2 cases
-PTI CBI has booked former Chief Medical Officer of Lucknow A K Shukla and former Deputy CMO Y S Sachan, who recently died inside Lucknow district prison under mysterious circumstances, in the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission scam. The agency has filed two cases in the scam as it found leads which indicate that huge financial bungling was allegedly committed by the UP Health Department officials in connivance with the contractors, CBI...
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