Government proposes to provide basic insurance coverage to an estimated 43 crore unorganized workers Furthering the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s objective of inclusive growth, the National Advisory Council (NAC) headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi will discuss ways of bringing India’s unorganized workers under the social security net in its meeting on 29 November. A new NAC working group on social security is working on draft recommendations that will seek to...

The parliamentary panel examining the Lokpal bill is learnt to have formulated a five-stage mechanism that separates investigation from prosecution, and maintains “equilibrium in the holy trinity” of CBI, CVC and the proposed Lokpal. On the question of whether to include the prime minister in the Lokpal’s purview, opinion in the standing committee, sources said, has narrowed to two points of view: keeping the PM out and, including the PM with...

Till a few years ago, the final arbiter of what is and is not permissible programming was the Union information & broadcasting ministry. In this scrupulous act of discernment, it was aided by the central monitoring services: college students would be appointed as monitors to watch television programmes and listen to radio shows round the clock and report to the ministry. Any channel or radio show that transgressed the programme...

-The Times of India   Born in Parliament, the right to education (RTE) is now being nurtured by children who want to make it a reality in every part of the country. On Children's Day, students from different states related their struggles and successes in bringing their friends to school and teachers to the classroom. They demanded hygienic mid-day meals for students and also raised their voice against gender discrimination. These little...

In this Idea Exchange moderated by Senior Editor Archna Shukla, I&B minister Ambika Soni speaks about self-regulation by the media, empowering the Press Council of India and the Congress party’s stand on corruption Archna Shukla: There is a growing perception that the government is unhappy with media criticism. The editor of a leading English daily publicly claimed that government advertisements have been stopped to his publication. Is the government being vindictive? I have...