Members of Parliament, cutting across party lines, have demanded an increase in the wages and workdays of the beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the flagship programmes of the UPA government, so as to insulate them from the galloping inflation. The demands were made by the members, including those of the ruling Congress-led ruling coalition, at a meeting of the parliamentary consultative committee on the...

-The Times of India   In what is expected to be an action-packed day, Parliament will discuss on Tuesday the CAG indictments of the Prime Minister's Office and Delhi CM Shiela Dikshit under the garb of a debate on the privilege motion which the BJP has brought against sports minister Ajay Maken for allegedly misleading the Houses by blaming Suresh Kalmadi's appointment as CWG boss on the NDA government. The Congress had...

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,...

Government is expected to unveil new guidelines for its flagship rural employment scheme, which will have a special focus on naxal-affected areas and stress on skill development. Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh said the new guidelines will give authorities greater flexibility in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. Addressing a meeting of Parliamentary Consultative Committee on MGNREGA here, Ramesh said complaints have come mainly from states like...

The Lokpal Bill is in danger of skidding off the rails. As it is introduced in Parliament, eminent activist Aruna Roy tells Shoma Chaudhury why we should not rush into it. THE LOKPAL BILL is now being debated in Parliament, almost 40 years after the idea was first mooted. Unfortunately, parented on one side by decades of wilful government inertia and, on the other, by the panicked hustle of ‘Team...