Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh wants to sidestep categories proposed under the food security law to make sure that the welfare impact of the legislation isn’t nullified because a count that’s central to it hasn’t been completed across large parts of the nation. Ramesh wants 25kg of foodgrain given every month to 75% of the rural poor and 50% of the urban poor at subsidized rates. The National Food Security Bill, which...

-The Indian Express The CBI on Saturday carried out fresh searches across 23 locations in Uttar Pradesh in connection with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam. The searches are being carried out across 12 districts including Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Meerut, Jhansi at the residences of health department officials of the state, who had held the posts of Chief Medical Officers (CMO) and Deputy CMOs, CBI sources said. The agency had yesterday registered...

-The Business Standard   A Nandan Nilekani-led task force on an Aadhaar-enabled unified payment infrastructure has recommended setting up a network of one million interoperable micro-ATMs across the country. The ATMs will be operated by business correspondents. The task force, headed by the Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India, submitted its report to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday. The panel has suggested that in order to set-up this network quickly, a last-mile transaction...

After much debate, the Cabinet cleared the food security bill. Will it really ensure food for every Indian? THE Lokpal Bill debate may have ended in a fiasco but 2011 ended on a positive note for the Congress-led UPA government on another count. Its pet project, the National Food Security Bill (NFSB), was cleared by the Union Cabinet and introduced in Parliament. The bill seeks to address widespread hunger in the...

The alleged incident of two quarry workers in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district being forced to swallow faeces draws attention to larger issues. NORMALLY the villages and hamlets in and around Thiruvakkarai in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district are woken up by the loud noise and vibrations caused by the blasting of rocks and the pounding of boulders with sledge hammers, apart from the rattling sound of tipper lorries transporting stones from 40-odd...