With the Supreme Court giving its nod reopening the probe into non-filing of proper accounts of election expenditure, vis-à-vis “paid news” against the former Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, the Election Commission has fixed a fresh hearing for May 17. Most probably the EC will decide to have a daily hearing as Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi is demitting office on June 10, informed sources said. The issue was first exposed by The Hindu. Campaign advertisements in support...

-The Hindustan Times After the spacious confines of Rashtrapati Bhavan, it would appear that President Pratibha Patil would like to move to an accommodation of the sort she is used to and then some. Ms Patil finds herself at the heart of a controversy in which she has been allotted around 2.60 lakh square feet of land in the Pune cantonment area to build a post-retirement home. Now Rashtrapati Bhavan may go...

Women and impoverished, illiterate tribals fall prey to Madhya Pradesh’s overweening family planning zeal Birth Control 1951 Family planning as a policy is launched in independent India 1978 Rechristened Family Welfare after the emergency 2000 National Population Policy aims at stable population by 2045 2010 Madhya Pradesh launches targeted family planning NPP says sterilisation should be last resort in family planning. *** When Shyam Lal* walked into a primary health centre at Rewa, a dusty little town in...

Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has, among other things, been able to take the Right to Information (RTI) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale. Aruna, a question that has been troubling me quite a bit in the context...

Historians tell us of the colonial era stories of miserable conditions of workers, even bonded labour, in tea plantations of eastern India. However, the situation improved after independence. In the past few decades the tea industry has made steady profits even in worst years of economic downturn. And that is why reports of starvation deaths in tea plantations of Assam are so shocking. An Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report says that...