Pantoka is a beehive of activity. The SPIRit of protest in this small hamlet on the India-Nepal border is not a simple case of topical environmental awakening; it is a desperate struggle for life in which more than 1 lakh lives are at stake. Today, the first day of June, the citizens of Bihar's Raxaul sub-division in East Champaran district will stage a massive blockade on National Highway 28A, shutting off...
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Taming price rise: Govt panel for FDI in multi-product retail
-The Times of India An inter-ministerial group (IMG) on inflation has recommended allowing foreign direct investment in multi-product retail as one of the two steps to tame rising prices and cut down the margin between farm gate and retail prices. This is the first formal recommendation by a government panel to allow FDI in the tightly policed and sensitive retail sector. "It is time for India to allow foreign direct investment in...
More »Dangers of all-powerful Lokpal by Nikhil Dey and Ruchi Gupta
The Jan Lokpal is being vested with sweeping powers, which are susceptible to misuse. The centralised structure of the Lokpal will be ill-suited for sorting out governance deficit. People will be confined to being complainants and applicants. There is need to make the Jan Lokpal people-centric FOR many who quite rightly guessed that the Lokpal Bill drafted by the government would be a non-starter, the alternative merited automatic support. However, little...
More »RTI activists deplore proposed exclusion of CBI, NIA and NATGRID
-The Hindu The National Campaign for People's Right to Information has expressed its concern at the reported official move to exclude agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) from the Right to Information Act. In a statement signed by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Prashant Bhushan, Venkatesh Nayak and Anjali Bharadwaj, among others, the NCPRI described the proposed exclusion...
More »The other side of food inflation: Farm labour costs rise 50% in two years by Harish Damodaran
Everyone knows how much food prices have risen in the last few years. Not everyone, however, knows how much costs have SPIRalled for those who produce the food you and I eat. Data on daily wage rates for agricultural operations, compiled by the Labour Bureau at Shimla, show huge increases to have taken place in most States during 2009 and 2010. Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has seen farm wage rates – the...
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