A pilot survey finding that 25-30% of the rural population can be automatically excluded from food security entitlements for below poverty line population might help forge a consensus between the government and the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council. The "automatic exclusion" criteria, devised on the basis of the N C Saxena report on methodology for a BPL census, is more liberal than the "bare bones" approach adopted by the government in...

The union finance ministry’s decision to partially subside capital investment in healthcare and education by extending the “viability gap funding” facility to these sectors is welcome as they are vital areas of social infrastructure, which are no less important than roads and bridges. But every sector has its own complexity and the nuancing that the health ministry has sought for such subsidy to healthcare infrastructure needs serious attention. The ministry’s...

The Prime Minister's focus on double-digit growth is not due to any ‘growth mania'. It is for the benefit of the poor. At a recent function for police officers, the Prime Minister observed: “If we don't control Naxalism, we have to say goodbye to our country's ambition to sustain a growth rate of 10 to 11 per cent per annum.” Some commentators (like Prof Prabhat Patnaik of JNU) interpret this (in a...

Have right, will ask. That's the spirit of the growing number of information seekers in the state who are increasingly using the Right to Information (RTI) Act to know who's spending taxpayers' money — and how. Enacted in the summer of 2005, the RTI Act has seen a dramatic rise in its users with Karnataka registering a 10-fold increase in just four years. Latest figures by the Karnataka Information Commission, the...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...