As food and civil supplies minister in the previous SP regime, Raja Bhaiya swindled Rs 100 crore from the PDS. As he presides over the food ministry once again, Ashish Khetan exposes the shocking loot A LITTLE MORE than a month ago, Akhilesh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, earned a landslide victory on the idea of hope: Ummeed ki cycle. He had promised clean governance and a corruption-free government. When...

-The Economic Times The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Constitutional validity does not mean sense - after all, being stupid is not illegal. Public opinion is most exercised about all schools, even those that get no aid from government, being asked to provide 25% of their seats free to poor students.  The court has pronounced this a blow for affirmative action. Private schools...

-Statesman News Service The state food department will set up rice mills on the public-private partnership (PPP) model at 158 blocks of the state. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has initiated the process to avoid any further problem in rice procurement. The crop production was high this year, but due to dearth of rice mills the state food department initially faced problem in the procurement process. State food minister Jyotipriya Mullick said: "We...

-The Shillong Times   Taking cognizance over malpractices prevailing in the Public Distribution System (PDS) in the State, the Government is planning to computerize the whole system to check the malaise. To achieve this objective, the State Government has already submitted a Detailed Project Report (DPR) amounting to Rs 43 crore for computerization of the Public Distribution System (PDS) to the Central Government. “We had submitted the DPR through the National Informatics Centre (NIC)...

-The Asian Age   In order to plug the Pilferage of food items meant for distribution to people below the poverty line, the Supreme Court on Friday directed the Union food secretary to hasten the process of computerisation of entire PDS system. A bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Dipak Misra set a deadline of two months to put in place the computerisation process for the PDS in entire country while asking the...