Draft proposed by the Government of India is inadequate and will not serve the purpose, says CPI(M); BJP agrees and disagrees with HazareAs support to the agitation by veteran social activist Anna Hazare in favour of ‘Jan Lokpal Bill' gathered momentum, Congress president and the Chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC) Sonia Gandhi on Thursday said his views would receive the ‘full attention' of the government and appealed to...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

Garnering impressive support from the public, veteran anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare embarked on a fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar here on Tuesday, demanding passing of the Jan Lokpal Bill drafted through a civil society initiative. He also rejected Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's appeal to call off the fast and engage in a discussion with a Sub-Committee of the Group of Ministers over the framing of the Lokpal Bill. Visits Rajghat Mr. Hazare first visited...

The editorial, Not a wealth of information (Our Take, March 19), was a correct description of what WikiLeaks has revealed about how India's foreign affairs and political establishments work. However, one sentence needs to be commented on, and that is its recommendation for setting up "a commission to look into the idea of public funding of political campaigns". This reveals how short our public memory is. Three learned groups have laboured...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...