Mohali is slated to become one of the first districts in the country where preparations for issuing Unique Identification Numbers (UID) are scheduled to commence from February 15. District administration officials said that once the process of compiling data is commenced from the middle of this month, it would take at least four months for the disbursal of the 12-digit UID to residents of the district to start and would be...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

The Election Commission has started a sample survey in five poll-bound states to get an idea of voter attitudes and clear misconceptions to ensure greater turnout at booths. The exercise, being conducted by state chief electoral officers, will be completed within the next three or four weeks before elections are notified in Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Commission official Akshay Rout said a similar survey had been conducted in the...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

A day labourer has complained to court that a panchayat pradhan in cahoots with a bank manager has thrust a loan of Rs 30,000 on him for which he had never applied, the allegation exposing how beneficiaries of village schemes are left at the mercy of influential rural leaders.Additional chief judicial magistrate Manoj Rai, after criticising the police role in the investigation, asked the Islampur subdivisional officer yesterday to inquire...