Corruption and government apathy may not be hurting MNREGS as much as well-intentioned tinkering There is growing concern that the Centre’s allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) is dropping off. Correspondingly, the average number of days of work created in some of the states is dropping sharply. This decline in the spending of MNREGS money is not a one-off event but has been happening over the...

Let down by governments that curb free speech, we have become our own hecklers In free speech jurisprudence, there is a concept called a “heckler’s veto”. It means the ability — but not the right — of a private actor, the heckler, to be loud and obnoxious enough to obscure the free speech of others. By pattern, a heckler is someone who is unable to defend his argument by legitimate use...

How our dismal education scene is linked to our intolerance What’s common to the Salman Rushdie episode, India’s dismal educational scenario—as underlined by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Pratham’s 7th Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER)—and its appalling ranking on the Global Hunger Index (GHI)? It’s clear even on the surface: a deep disconnect between India’s claims on democratic superpower status and its grim reality. If you probe...

Corruption has become a serious problem, defying solutions. To curb it, several measures are needed apart from the Lokpal bill, the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill and the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Persons Making the Disclosures Bill, otherwise known as the whistlblowers protection bill. The three bills, in their present form, do not appear capable of achieving the avowed objective. Like the Right to Information Act, these bills...

The Republic of India has a billion (and more) citizens who, at any given time, are involved in a thousand (and more) controversies. Knowing which controversy is the most significant is always hard, and often impossible, to judge. Even so, we can be fairly certain that 2011 will go down in Indian history as the year of the Great Lokpal Debate, just as 1962 was the year of the war...