-The Deccan Chronicle   Shashidhar Mishra could have spent his entire life as a street vendor in his native village at Begusarai, Bihar. But he decided to get the information kept in the government files unlocked by filing more than 1,000 RTI applications. The reward he got was death. He was killed in his native village by unidentified gunmen in February 2010. Mishra is among at least 16 RTI activists who have...

-The Hindu   Minimum wages to unorganised workers The draft labour policy, released by Labour Minister Shibu Baby John here on Tuesday, proposes measures to ensure minimum wages to workers in the unorganised sector and check unhealthy tendencies such as ‘nokkukooli' in the loading and unloading sector. Releasing the policy, the Minister said that no time frame had been fixed for achieving these objectives because attitudes needed to be changed. All trade unions had...

The ever-energetic Jairam Ramesh has unveiled a new land acquisition policy for discussion. He has taken on the difficult task of changing an old law whose implementation has led to a sorry mess in Nandigram, Singur and Noida, to mention only a few of the recent cases that have hit the headlines. India’s policy regime for managing land rights and land transactions is totally dysfunctional. Greedy politicians in state governments have...

-IANS   Eminent agriculture scientist and a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), M.S. Swaminathan, has cautioned against the government's plan to replace subsidised food with cash under the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA). "The government's plan to replace subsidised ration with cash under the public distribution system (PDS) is faulty. It will lead to low procurement and less production subsequently. This will be bad for Indian agriculture," Swaminathan...

The Delhi High Court today appointed an adhoc regulatory committee to examine the 2009 notification of the Delhi government which allowed schools to hike tuition and development fees. The court in its judgment on a bunch of petitions filed by various parents associations, including the Delhi Abhibhavak Mahasangh, also suggested to the Delhi government to constitute an expert committee which can go into the feasibility of establishing a regulatory body for...