After taking on Suresh Kalmadi and Co on the Commonwealth Games, Rajya Sabha MP and former panchayati raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has now trained his guns on the UPA government and the Planning Commission for Bureaucratising all flagship programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the National Rural Health Mission. In a free-wheeling interview with ET, Mr Aiyar said instead of relying on panchayati raj institutions for better...

Arjun Kumar Sengupta, a developmental economist and Member of the Rajya Sabha, passed away on Sunday evening. He was 73 and is survived by his wife Jayshree Sengupta and daughter Madhura Sengupta who teaches in Canada. He has had a multi-faceted career as a academician, economic policy administrator and a Parliamentarian. “I am deeply grieved to learn about the sad demise of Dr Arjun Kumar Sengupta, Member of Parliament. He will...

Five years after the enactment of the Right to Information Act, awareness of the law, its provisions and potential appears to be very low. Marking the completion of five years, in September 2010, of the enactment of the Right to Information Act, the Central Information Commission (CIC) held the fifth annual convention on “RTI: Challenges and Opportunities,” in New Delhi on September 13 and 14. It was largely a gathering of...

Bhaggu, 65, says he can trace his memory back to when he was five. And he remembers the paradox that’s taunted him since: Of his village — Sohras, in northern Uttar Pradesh — being flooded every year and him having no water to drink. “They (government) distribute food, tarpaulin, kerosene, matchboxes but never made any arrangement for water,” says Bhaggu, a farm worker who goes by one name. “I think no...

The minister for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh’s order stopping Vedanta Aluminum Ltd and the Orissa Mining Corporation from mining bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills to feed the company’s adjacent Lanjigarh aluminum refinery plant located in one of the country’s poorest districts in the name of tribal interest tends to miss the wood for the trees. It is based on the report of a four-member expert group under N C...