Meeting of Secretaries convened for 8 March; data on 1,000 officers already in Union Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar is calling a meeting of union secretaries here on 8 March to convey to them a government decision making it mandatory for bureaucrats to put details of the moveable and immoveable property they own on a government website. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been pushing for this as part of a promised clean-up...

The GoM to determine the norms for coalmine clearance in reserve forests, largely in tribal areas, and the parallel exercise to give back forest lands to tribals is not about the environment, but about forest policy. The divergence of interests between national use of forests, ecological balance and needs of local people should be recognised. However, the tribal affairs ministry is responsible for the Forest Rights Act and the coal...

India’s drug regulator has refused to disclose key information about a controversial government study that provided Indian girls a vaccine designed to protect them from cervical cancer, amplifying suspicions about the study’s objectives. The Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) has refused to release for public scrutiny the study’s protocols, which are expected to contain information about its purpose and methodology, a set of health activists said yesterday. The Union government had...

Tribals of Gujarat are all set to get a new voice. With only Ganpat Vasava, the BJP MLA from Mangrol, filing his nomination for the speaker's post in the state assembly, he will be elected unopposed on Thursday. This will not only give Gujarat's its first tribal speaker, but at 39 years, he will also be the youngest in the state's history. The post fell vacant after the last speaker...

The Supreme Court will hear in open court on February 28 the curative petition filed by the Union government seeking enhancement of compensation of $470 million for Bhopal gas victims. The petition said the compensation, determined by the Supreme Court in 1989, was arrived at on the basis of assumptions of truth unrelated to realities. A five-judge Bench comprising Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices Altamas Kabir, R.V. Raveendran, B. Sudershan...