-The Hindu The Madhya Pradesh Vishesh Nyayalaya Adhiniyam (Madhya Pradesh Special Courts Bill) 2011 has received the presidential assent and will come into force on February 15, 2012. The anti-corruption act equips the government with wide-ranging powers to weed out corruption, including the power to confiscate illegally earned properties of corrupt officials and use them as public assets. A similar law is already in force in Bihar. Under the Act, special courts dealing...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

-The Business Standard Implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a flagship programme of the Central government to alleviate poverty, has resulted in an increase of up to 20 per cent in the cost of farm production in Karnataka. It has also created a shortage of labour in the agriculture sector in the state. According to a study conducted by the Bangalore-based Institute for Social and Economic Change...

Dispelling the general perception that the CPI(Maoist), the left wing extremist outfit, is opposed to all industrial projects, Odisha-based top red leader Sabyasachi Panda said going all out against industries would shatter the livelihood of labourers. The secretary of the Odisha organising committee of CPI(Maoist) clarified this while speaking to a select group of journalists at an undisclosed location in Kandhamal district, about 250 km from here, on Thursday evening. “Communism always...

Liquor baron Ponty Chadha’s mercurial rise is all ‘Maya’ A reclusive liquor baron may seem like an anomaly in these never-ending good times. But Gurdeep Singh Chadha—better known by the moniker Ponty Chadha—fits the bill. Often called “Mayawati’s financier”, the 57-year-old Ponty has been making large (if silent) waves for the political patronage he enjoys in Uttar Pradesh. Any bottle of liquor sold in India’s most populous state goes through his...