-ANI Defending the decision to provide minority (Muslim) reservation, Law Minister, Salman Khurshid on Sunday said that the Central Government had powers to grant quota to backwards castes of minority communities within the Hindu backward caste quota. The Election Commission has stayed the government decision to grant 4.5 percent reservation to minorities (Muslims) in government jobs and educational institutions due to ongoing state polls. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has opposed the move, contending...

Factory official killed after death of union leader in police action In a major outbreak of industrial violence following the death of a trade union leader, a top official of a ceramic company in Yanam, a small enclave of Puducherry in Andhra Pradesh, was killed by workers at his residence here on Friday. The workers went on the rampage after their leader M.S. Murali Mohan was killed in police action outside the...

Questionable drug trials on mentally challenged persons by doctors in Indore emphasise the need for strict enforcement of medical ethics. IN what appears to be a page out of Robin Cook's medical thriller, government and private doctors in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, reportedly carried out clinical trials of various medicines on some 233 patients who had gone to them seeking psychiatric treatment. As in Cook's famous book Coma, in which a medical...

-The Hindu   By filing a Special Leave Petition against the Karnataka High Court order directing payment of statutory minimum wages to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the United Progressive Alliance government has betrayed its insensitivity to the rights of the poor. The courts have ruled that payment below minimum wage amounts to “forced labour”, which is constitutionally prohibited. The Centre's implacable stand that workers employed...

The National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development, or Nabard, has started lending directly to infrastructure projects out of its own resources for the first time in 30 years, in an attempt to diversify its activities and make itself relevant at a time when the dynamics of the rural market are changing.  Essentially a refinance bank till recently, Nabard has created a Rs 1,000-crore special window for lending to build core...