-PTI Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda today said his government would look into the possibilities of reducing cess on petrol after the June 11 biennial elections to the state Legislative Council. "I will look into the possibilities of reducing cess on petrol soon after the elections to the legislative council. For now, I can't comment on the issue due to model code of conduct," he told reporters. The statement comes in the...
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Petrol price hike not a correct step: AK Antony
-The Hindustan Times In a first sign of dissent within the UPA Government over the recent Rs. 7 hike in petrol prices, defence minister AK Antony on Tuesday said it was “not a correct step”. Antony's remarks came soon after he landed at Neyyattinkara in Kerala to campaign for Congress candidate R Selvaraj for the June 2 assembly by-elections. “The hike in petrol price was not a correct step. The oil companies should...
More »Chorus of unreason -TK Rajalakshmi
Political parties across the spectrum get into a tangle over an innocuous cartoon in a school textbook THE textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) are in the news again. This time, it is not history but political science textbooks that managed to get almost all Members of Parliament on their feet on an emotive issue and for reasons that defied logic. One day before the 60th...
More »Economic slowdown: Poor to feel fund crunch-Chetan Chauhan
The global economic slowdown may pinch the poor in India. The Planning Commission is redrawing its projections for the 12th five year plan (2012-17) in wake of current global economic situation and could end up scaling down money for welfare schemes. Health, education and rural development are not expected to get the hike they had sought and allocations for some other ministries are likely to fall, prompted by a lower growth. The...
More »Politics and Pedagogy The NCERT Texts and Cartoons by Valerian Rodrigues
School texts that teach young minds that politics is a contentious and critical but reasonable activity, that it is not merely a set of demands and commands, and that politicians have to be responsive and accountable are naturally disliked by the political class. This is the tone of all the Political Science textbooks of Standards IX-XI brought out after 2006. The nurturing of a culture of critical public opinion seems...
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