India launches on Thursday the task of counting its teeming billion-plus population, with 2.5 million people set to fan out over the country to begin work for the 2011 census. The exercise has formidable challenges -- coverage of a vast geographical area, left-wing rebels and separatists, widespread illiteracy, and people with a bewildering diversity of cultures, languages and customs. "The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10...

Seeks public opinion on list put up on Rural Development Ministry website  Ministry invited applications for setting up a panel of 100 eminent citizens Only five women on the list; people from all States not represented The Rural Development Ministry has prepared its first provisional list of 65 eminent citizens for monitoring the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). It put the names on the website, seeking public...

“Wherever there is a lamp, there is darkness below it,” said Bava Bhalekar, a fisherman and local leader in this village roughly a hundred miles south of Mumbai. “The tragedy is that while our village has this project, we ourselves don’t have electricity.” “This project” is the power plant that Enron built. A decade after Enron withdrew from the project, the Indian government and two Indian companies are promising to...

Political influence and interference hampering distribution, says court-appointed vigilance panel  Large-scale diversion of foodgrains; black marketing by fair price shop dealers All-round complicity among FPS, transporters and corrupt Civil Supplies officials The Supreme Court-appointed Central Vigilance Committee (CVC) has slammed the Public Distribution System as one of the most corrupt sectors, saying the root cause of its failure in several States is political interference. “Corruption is all pervasive in the entire chain involved...

THEY DARED TO DO THEIR DUTY: THEY HAVE BEEN KILLED AND HARASSED FOR IT. PERHAPS THERE is a reason why Sanjiv Chaturvedi’s journey begins in the small dusty town of Kurukshetra, for his story is as epic a battle between good and evil, his journey as much a pursuit of dharma. Only, he is the sole Pandava on this battlefront, and he is the one who called the war. It was...