-The Times of India   The government on Saturday released a list of assets owned by Union ministers. Urban development minister Kamal Nath and his family top the charts with a net worth of over Rs 263 crore. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's holdings are a little over Rs 5 crore. At the bottom of the pile is the low-profile defence minister, A K Antony, who claims he has a paltry Rs 1.8 lakh...

Acute dissatisfaction verging on disgust with the behaviour and performance of some Members of Parliament and members of Legislative Assemblies has generated a debate about enacting a legislation for recall of elected members. Under the present law, an MP or an MLA has a fixed term of office for five years. Articles 102 and 191 of the Constitution specify the contingencies in which a person shall be disqualified for being...

Around the time Anna Hazare ended his fast at Ramlila Maidan and declared "electoral reforms" as his next agenda, 15 different organizations under the aegis of "Forum For Good Governance" kicked off a daylong deliberation on the same issue. Eminent members of the judiciary, political class, civil society and bureaucracy participated in the national conference on the 'urgency of electoral and political party reforms'. The success of Anna Hazare's anti-graft movement...

Over the last few days, as a desperate government tried to tide over the Lokpal Bill crisis, it received over half-a-dozen variants of the draft legislation. On Saturday, both Houses of Parliament took up the subject and though the debate was mostly confined to the Jan Lokpal Bill, it made the political point that while an effective law should be devised to tackle corruption, Parliament’s supremacy must be maintained. The...

-The Hindu   “Its members should not be from the government” With the impasse between the civil society and the government on the structure of the Lokpal Bill continuing, the former Chief Election Commissioner, T.N. Seshan, announced his version of the Bill on Friday, which provides for establishing an anti-graft body similar to the Election Commission. “The issue of corruption is important to the nation and this is an accepted view on all sides,”...