Though normally punishment should be proportionate to the gravity of misconduct of an employee, for corruption/misappropriation the only deserts are dismissal, the Supreme Court has held. It is not the amount embezzled but the mens rea (criminal intention) to misappropriate public money that is enough justification to dismiss the delinquent employee, said a Vacation Bench of Justices B.S. Chauhan and Swatanter Kumar. The Bench, quoting an earlier ruling, said: “Any sympathy shown...

While the Supreme Court should become a Constitutional Court, the setting up of Courts of Appeal, each comprising 15 judges divided into five benches, for the four regions of the country will prove to be a real boon to litigants.  Things had come to a pass in the Supreme Court of India, when Justice E.S. Venkataramiah in P.N. Kumar v. Municipal Corporation of Delhi, (1987) 4 SCC 609 relegated the...

Flaws In The PDS… Poor verification norms, over two crore bogus BPL cards Over 1.2 crore BPL families don’t have a ration card No monitoring, resulting in pilferage, gaps in delivery, poor quality foodgrains Poor profit margins a major cause for corruption Lack of information hinders benefits from reaching the poor …and the Solutions Base fair price shops on new business model The Centre takes ‘responsibility’ for delivery in states Make verification...

Seeks public opinion on list put up on Rural Development Ministry website  Ministry invited applications for setting up a panel of 100 eminent citizens Only five women on the list; people from all States not represented The Rural Development Ministry has prepared its first provisional list of 65 eminent citizens for monitoring the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). It put the names on the website, seeking public...

The central vigilance committee led by retired Justice D. P. Wadhwa, which was established by the Supreme Court of India to monitor its orders in the PIL on the right to food, has come out with a strong indictment of the public distribution system (PDS). Based on State-level reports for Delhi, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Karnataka, the committee has identified widespread corruption at different levels of the...