-The Hindu The Planning Commission needed to be returned to its first purposes, to its transparent and audacious planning for an India progressing without old enervations and new injustices to prosperity. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. The 18th century nursery rhyme, its original probably a riddle, is loved for the one image it invokes - a great fall. The picture of a dumpy egg, of a being...
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Democracy and Its Inconvenient Questions-Ajay Dandekar and Kaveri Gill
-Economic and Political Weekly The case of the local people's grievance against the mining of iron ore for the Bhilai steel plant from Rowghat in the reserved forest area of Chhattisgarh, a Fifth Schedule Area, is just one more example of the infringement of constitutional rights and guarantees. It also portends what is to come with the polity poised to take a decisive right-wing turn. Ajay Dandekar (ajayd16@gmail.com) is a faculty member,...
More »Instances of censorship on the rise: The Hoot-Anita Joshua
-The Hindu Long list of agents against free expression Censorship across the country is on the rise with as many as 52 instances being recorded in the first quarter of 2014. Releasing data on censorship for the first three months of this year, media watch group, The Hoot, said this averaged a little less than one a day. The agents against free expression were not just the state or fringe groups. The...
More »Lest we forget-Vikram Kapur
-The Hindu It will be a decade tomorrow since whistleblower Satyendra Dubey was killed. A tribute. You would have been scared. You would have been scared, when you left your home in the village of Shahpur at 15 in search of a good education and a better life. You would have been scared that first day at the IIT, wondering how you, a village boy from Bihar, would cope with all the...
More »Don't blame the implementers by Shubhasis Gangopadhyay
Corruption and government apathy may not be hurting MNREGS as much as well-intentioned tinkering There is growing concern that the Centre’s allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) is dropping off. Correspondingly, the average number of days of work created in some of the states is dropping sharply. This decline in the spending of MNREGS money is not a one-off event but has been happening over the...
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