At the Independent People's Tribunal in Delhi last year, a young tribal man, Lingaram Kodopi, had a question: "My family is well off, but they [security forces] accuse me of being a Naxalite. Why can't we adivasis wear a good watch or drive a car without being picked up by the police?" In September 2009, 10 men with AK-47s entered Kodopi's home in Sameli, Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. They wanted to know...
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Ministry approves proposal for UID-linked direct subsidy transfer by Surabhi Agarwal
The finance ministry has put its seal of approval on a proposal to directly transfer subsidies to the bank account of a beneficiary that is linked to her Aadhaar, or unique identification (UID) number. The government has previously articulated its desire to experiment with direct transfers to make its management of subsidies more efficient and ensure benefits actually reach the targeted people. In a notification issued on Tuesday, the finance ministry extended...
More »The Union Cabinet gets healthier by P Sainath
The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...
More »Bharatpur Collector, SP removed
-The Hindu Rattled by the emerging evidence that police resorted to indiscriminate firing at a mosque, the Congress-led government removed the Bharatpur Collector and the Superintendent of Police and decided to hand over the inquiry into Wednesday's violence in Gopalgarh to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot also announced a judicial inquiry into the incidents in the eastern Rajasthan town by a retired High Court Judge at a high-level...
More »Poverty and food insecurity rise in the US by Chris Arsenault
More than 2.5 million Americans fell into poverty last year, bringing the total number to its highest in 52 years. After touring food banks across Tennessee, Marcia Wells was not surprised by the latest statistics showing that more Americans are living in poverty today than at any time since the Census Bureau began first publishing the number 52 years ago. In the US, 2.6 million people fell into poverty last year, the...
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