-PTI Karnataka Government would abide by the Supreme Court decision on the recommendation of Central Empowered Committee to extend CBI probe into illegal mining in the state, Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda said today. "I will abide by the Supreme Court decision," he told reporters when asked about CEC's recommendation to the court yesterday for a CBI probe into illegal mining in Karnataka. Gowda had earlier rejected demands for a CBI probe...
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NREGA widens gaps between states by Subhomoy Bhattacharjee
Five years into the implementation of the right to work programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has the potential to create even sharper division between states than what existed before it was launched. This is becoming increasingly clear through reports like the second report of the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on NREGA, released last week in Delhi by rural development minister Jairam Ramesh. It is...
More »Ramesh opposes cap on counting poor in states by Prasad Nichenametla
Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has called for removal of ceilings on poverty estimation, which restrict the number of poor who can claim benefits from government schemes. His ministry is currently conducting a decennial (once in 10 years) census of the country's rural poor and a similar exercise will be launched for the first time in urban areas soon. But what is becoming a political issue is the planning commission's acceptance of...
More »The Union Cabinet gets healthier by P Sainath
The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...
More »Those discordant notes by KumKum Dasgupta
At the Independent People's Tribunal in Delhi last year, a young tribal man, Lingaram Kodopi, had a question: "My family is well off, but they [security forces] accuse me of being a Naxalite. Why can't we adivasis wear a good watch or drive a car without being picked up by the police?" In September 2009, 10 men with AK-47s entered Kodopi's home in Sameli, Dantewada, Chhattisgarh. They wanted to know...
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