The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday moved the Supreme Court challenging the Madras High Court judgment striking down ultra vires the amendment to the Tamil Nadu Uniform System of School Education Act to defer implementation of the ‘Samacheer system'. The special leave petition directed against the High Court judgment dated July 18 is likely to the mentioned for early hearing on Thursday. On behalf of students and parents, caveats had also...
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SATYANANAD MISHRA CHIEF INFORMATION COMMISSIONER IN WALK THE TALK WITH SHEKHAR GUPTA
In a season when every self-styled warrior against corruption is trying to look for a new weapon to fight it, my guest today is Satyananda Mishra, Chief Information Commissioner—someone who has in his control the strongest of those weapons, the RTI. Actually when it all began, nobody thought it would be so effective. In a period of five-and-a-half years, it has touched the hearts and minds of people. The number of...
More »Environment ministry cites loopholes in forest laws to defend clearing Posco- by Nitin Sethi
NEW DELHI: The environment ministry made a specious argument before the Cuttack bench of Orissa High Court, defending its decision to clearPosco without verifying if the Forest Rights Act had been violated or not in diverting forest land to the Rs 54,000 crore integrated steel plant. It said that the law – also UPA's flagship pro-tribal scheme -- did not provide any mechanism to verify its implementation in a case,...
More »For better laws, debate and discuss bills first by Vipul Mudgal
Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption has a curious side-effect. It has turned the spotlight on India's lack of pre-legislative transparency. We may accept or dismiss team Anna's Jan Lokpal draft but his movement — and the subsequent build-up of hope and betrayal — has unwittingly exposed the systemic opaqueness in which our laws are conceived, written, debated and passed. The Lokpal Bill 2011 is one among 67-odd bills listed as...
More »Rethink the communal violence bill by Ashutosh Varshney
The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...
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