The ministry of personnel has shown a surprising lack of alacrity in prosecuting errant babus In August last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was keynote speaker at the annual meeting of India’s premier anti-corruption agency, the CBI. There, addressing officers of the agency and state vigilance bureaus, he made a telling remark, “Our anti-corruption agencies must make the cost of corruption unacceptably high for those indulging in this evil practice.” The prime...

No practice has been violated in seeking sanction for grant of a daily allowance by the Union government to the spouse of Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan, Supreme Court Secretary-General (SG) said on Friday. The statement came in response to a reply furnished by the Law Ministry to RTI activist Subash Chandra Agrawal that the SG recently requested revised sanction allowing a daily allowance to the CJI’s spouse for...

The Centre has imposed temporary restrictions on new development projects in industrial clusters that score more than 70 points on the Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI) issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. The restrictions on projects from critically polluted industrial clusters will be applicable for eight months during which time the Central Pollution Control Board along with the respective State Pollution Control Boards will finalise a time-bound action...

The government needs to allocate more funds for public health. The mismatch between the declared objective of universal healthcare through the public health system and the actual level of expenditure remains serious.  One of the three most important planks on which Barak Obama won the U.S. presidential election was the country’s healthcare system, which he promised to fix. Indeed, the most important legislative measure initiated by Mr. Obama so far...

A committee appointed by the Union Government has found fault with the entire process of land reforms, particularly the dubious role of officialdom, and called for revisiting the land ceiling limits and that too with retrospective effect. The Committee on State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task in Land Reforms, set up subsequent to the constitution of the National Council for Land Reforms under the Prime Minister, has underlined the relevance...