The commission plans to file several cases under the SC & ST Act The battle of Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh's Greater NOIDA area, where violence raged recently over the contentious issue of land acquisition, promises to get bigger. On Thursday, the National Commission for the Scheduled Castes decided to summon the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police of Gautam Budh Nagar district, where the twin villages are located, to seek a...

Weighed down by an unending season of corruption, the political leadership of ruling the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has stepped in to rescue the regime’s flagship rural employment guarantee scheme from discredit due to mounting allegations of endemic irregularities. The National Advisory Council of the UPA, headed by Sonia Gandhi, on Wednesday asked the Manmohan Singh government to expedite notification of the much-awaited rules that would allow public scrutiny of the...

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed...

-The Hindu   Even as the debate over the inclusion of human rights activist Binayak Sen in the Planning Commission's steering committee on health still continues, the first meeting of the committee — that will guide the panel on drafting the 12 {+t} {+h} Plan — has been re-scheduled due to the non-availability of a large number of members on Wednesday. The meeting has now been fixed for June 22 as most...

-The Indian Express   Indian government uses public funds to alleviate, prevent and end poverty; but, unarguably, does so inefficiently. A new report from the World Bank for the Planning Commission on India’s “social protection” programmes outlines the scope of the failure and provides a few answers. Those programmes can be divided into three kinds, the report argues: those that prevent a slide into poverty, like social security and insurance schemes; those...