Taking a serious note of the increasing complaints of filling of ponds by land sharks, the state government has issued strict directives to the departments concerned to prepare a list of water bodies and initiate measures for their renovation. Talking to media on Monday, principal secretary (revenue and relief) KK Sinha said the state government had issued directives to all districts to prepare a list of water bodies on the basis...

The earlier draft covered only non-NBFC MFIs incorporated as trusts and non-governmental organizations that constitute a very small part of the total industry The proposed microfinance Bill for governing India’s Rs. 22,000 crore microlending industry is set to give more teeth to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to regulate larger microfinance institutions (MFIs). This will be done by removing such entities from the purview of laws enacted by state governments...

Guess what hogs the news? In a country plagued by rural problems and social ills, it's politics and business that find the maximum coverage in newspapers and not health, education, agriculture or environment. A comprehensive study of 10 newspapers in five states from mid-September to mid- November 2010 by The Hoot, a media monitor, found that political news constituted the maximum - 15.7 percent of the total news items, followed by...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...