-The Telegraph The government has decided to bring in an ordinance to ensure legal right to subsidised food for two-thirds of the country's population, choosing the executive route to avoid parliamentary debates and sharing credit with the Opposition. Sources said the Union cabinet was expected to take up the National Food Security Ordinance on Thursday and added that it was likely to be cleared and sent for presidential assent the same day. "The...

-PTI NEW DELHI: The government is not considering to amend the RTI Act to give immunity to political parties from providing information after the recent Central Information Commission's order brought them under the transparency law. Officials in the department of personnel and training (DoPT), which acts as nodal department for the implementation of RTI Act, said they have gone through the CIC's order and there was nothing that warranted their intervention. "If a...

-The Economic Times India's GDP growth has almost halved from 9.2% in 2010-11 to 5% in 2012-12. Major problems include a high current account deficit, high fiscal deficit, and lack of bank credit for small and medium enterprises. All three problems can be mitigated substantially by one single measure - reducing excess food stocks. So say Ashok Gulati and Surabhi Jain, chairman and joint director respectively of the Commission for Agricultural...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Nehru-Gandhi family, not surprisingly, emerges as the government's favourite when it comes to expenditure on newspaper advertisements on former leaders. Over the past five years, more than a third of UPA-2's spending on newspaper advertisements for birth and death anniversaries of former leaders has been on Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Of the total Rs 142.3 crore spent on newspaper advertisement on...

-The Telegraph Right to Information activists have accused political parties of making a mountain out of a molehill in their opposition to the Central Information Commission order bringing six parties under the RTI Act's ambit. They say the act has enough provisions to block queries on sensitive subjects such as campaign strategy or political discussions at meetings. "We moved the plea (before the CIC) to bring political parties under the RTI Act mainly...