-Tehelka Justice Sujata Manohar on how the Biotechnology Bill is fundamentally flawed IN THE last few years, regulatory systems across the board have been undergoing an overhaul to fit the needs of a new era. Likewise, new laws are being chalked out to meet new needs, and several are receiving flak owing to the loopholes and regressive grounds on which these have been drafted. The relatively more recent one to regulate modern...

By repeatedly decrying the CAG and trying to malign the person occupying that Constitutional office, the UPA government is weakening an important pillar of democracy and lowering its own credibility Admitting that there is a great deal of uncertainty and a perception of policy paralysis in the government these days, a senior Cabinet colleague of the prime minister recently observed that it was being created by the activities of (Comptroller and...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

-The Hindu Renowned trade union leader Dipankar Mukherjee (69), who passed away on Monday morning, was a brilliant parliamentarian with versatile capabilities. Elected to the Rajya Sabha in April 1994 from West Bengal as a Communist Party of India (Marxist) member, Mr. Mukherjee played an important role in intervening in all crucial economic and industrial policy-related issues during his 12-year-long parliamentary stint till 2006. Born in June 1943 in Kolkata, Mr. Mukherjee had...

India Inc. was aghast at the recent report of a parliamentary committee that recommended that a new draft land acquisition law limit occasions when the government may intervene to acquire land for use by private firms. But in a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly last month, Delhi University Economics professor Ram Singh laid out data that supports the committee’s recommendations. Mr. Singh argues that government-driven land acquisition is generally...