The National Advisory Council, headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, on Saturday settled for a much less ambitious National Food Security Act than it had previously agreed to. Scaling down its recommendations, it decided to recommend subsidised foodgrains for 46% of the rural Indian population and 28% of the urban population. The pruning of the recommendation had an immediate fallout, with the NAC member Jean Dreaze, face of the right-to-food security campaign,...

How would you rate the functioning of the RTI Act five years into its enactment? It has been a mixed experience. It is encouraging that we have one of the best laws in the world but its shoddy implementation is taking the sheen away. The two nerve centers of RTI are simplifying the process of filing an application and making the functioning of the Commission effective. The posts of Information Commissioner...

Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations continue at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), which will bear down on the Indian metropolis October 3-14, along with some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once part of the British Empire. Around-the-clock construction and spells of heavy monsoon rain have turned Delhi into a swirl of mud...

The amount of rural reportage in the Indian media remains far too low, with even important stories such as those on farmer suicides tending to be ignored. One of the outspoken critics of this trend has been P Sainath, rural-affairs editor of The Hindu  and 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. He was also the journalist who originally broke the story on...

In the long speeches made at the opening ceremony of the CW games, every important individual, department or institution that made a contribution, was acknowledged. Did anyone hear a word about the workers who made these world-class games possible? Maybe it was just a slip or maybe it was not considered necessary. Anyway, the workers were not there for the speeches, having been driven out of the capital just a...