Over the last few decades thenon-party volunteer organisations have been much more effective in Indian public space and more articulate in policy debates than the traditional Left parties. This essay, while recognising the manifold achievements of these organisations, reflects on the serious limitations of the activities of the voluntary sector and argues that when they usurp certain roles they can become a threat to representative democracy. [Pranab Bardhan (bardhan@econ.berkeley.edu) is at...
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Manmohan approves single bill for land acquisition, rehabilitation
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday gave Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh the green signal for his proposal to integrate in one bill the provisions for land acquisition and rehabilitation and resettlement. After calling on Dr. Singh for the first time since he assumed office, Mr. Ramesh told The Hindu that he had sought the Prime Minister's approval for a single Bill to cover the two issues, whereas his...
More »Indian media in a challenging environment by M Hamid Ansari
The Indian media have grown rapidly in scale, reach, influence, and revenues. But all stakeholders must realise that the ethical underpinning of professional journalism in the country has weakened and that the corrosion of public life in our country has impacted journalism. So what needs to be done? We have been witness in recent years to rapid, and unprecedented, changes in our society, economy, and polity. These have also transformed the...
More »Challenging the poverty dimension of inflation by Madan Sabnavis
A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...
More »Public utilities elude the RTI net. The cloak of privacy protects companies by Shonali Ghosal
WITH GOVERNMENT agencies like the CBI, NIA and NATGRID having escaped the RTI scanner, publicprivate ventures too are trying to slink away even as activists rally to include them under the Act. After the Central Information Commission (CIC) ruled on 30 May that Mumbai International Airport (Private) Limited (MIAL) is a public authority, the company was set to be the first Public- private Partnership (PPP) to be brought under RTI....
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