-The Hindu The Rajya Sabha on Thursday passed a crucial Bill that extends the time limit from three to six years for providing reservation to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in the Central education institutions. The Bill also seeks to add a proviso that if there are Central educational institutions in a tribal area, the State seats in those institutions shall have reservation for the SCs,...

Here’s a “growth story” that Standard and Poor’s missed: a piece of official statistics shows good old India has grown — literally. Over 5,000sqkm of wasteland has been converted into “net” usable terrain between 2005 and 2008, according to the Wasteland Atlas of India that was released today. Even Bengal, pilloried for profligacy and other wasteful pastimes, has done its modest bit to transform wasteland. But the big battles against barren land...

The speed and determination with which the Tamil Nadu government has been slapping its citizens right, left and centre with colonial-era laws, it would seem as if a full-fledged war of independence is raging in the fishing villages of Idinthakarai and Kudankulam along the coast of Tamil Nadu. According to findings by a team led senior journalist Sam Rajappa, in just four months between September (when the protest movement against the...

Difficult times call for difficult measures. Pushed into a corner by an unsustainable fiscal deficit and various sectors and programs (including the proposed food security legislation) screaming for a greater share of the budget pie, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in India has been forced to do what it might not have otherwise—reduce its marquee job guarantee scheme’s allocation in a big way for the first time.  In one...

Uttar Pradesh, which supposedly has a high proportion of the country's poor, has not begun the job of enumerating them even three-and-a-half months after the first deadline set by the Centre lapsed. The project started in June 2011, with the target of completing the job by the end of 2011. The Centre then extended the deadline to April. Bihar has covered just 0.1% of the population. While there is no word from...