-The Economic Times It is a shame, said the Prime Minister, releasing a new report that says 42% of India's children suffer from malnutrition. Dr Manmohan Singh went on to talk of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), the government's preferred scheme for tackling the problem, and of the need to to focus on 100 extremely backward districts.  An ICDS-like scheme is entirely appropriate but it would be a big mistake to...

Not only are the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act routinely violated in Chhattisgarh, the adivasis are also short-changed on legislative representation and reservations in government jobs. As the state cedes land to capital while reducing the adivasis to an ornamental presence, there is increasing assertion of adivasi identity, born out of class predicaments and experiences of displacement as much as notions of indigeneity. Supriya Sharma...

The drama in the Rajya Sabha showed that the UPA government was not willing to go even by the will of Parliament. This gives rise to fundamental questions about the functioning of Indian democracy. The year 2011 will be remembered in India as the year of the campaign against corruption and for the Jan Lokpal Bill. The campaign began in January 2011 in the backdrop of the publicity that accompanied the...

A day after the introduction of the anti-graft Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill, 2011, in the Lok Sabha, sources in the Central Bureau of Investigation on Friday felt that the agency's autonomy of investigation had been “seriously compromised”. CBI sources said the Bill did not seem to confer greater autonomy to the investigative agency—one of the focal points of the civil society's agitation for bringing about a strong, effective and credible Lokpal...

-Express News Service Branding the Adarsh scam a “classic example of the fence eating the crops” and “how a select and powerful elite could collude to subvert rules and regulations for personal benefit” , the Comptroller and Auditor General has slammed the government and officials in its audit of the Adarsh Cooperative Housing Society. The report, that was tabled in the Assembly on Friday, called the entire Adarsh episode a remarkable case...