-The Economic Times   Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, D Subbarao said on Tuesday that India's food inflation was fanned by change in dietary habits. Commenting on high inflation, Subbarao said that underlying drivers of inflation have changed.  "India needs to address challenge of food inflation. Food inflation has substantially come down but over the last 3.5 years since 2008-2009, average food inflation has shot up higher than the past 6...

The return of peace and normalcy in Kashmir is a reality. And to ensure a durable and lasting peace, a humane approach to handle the law and order situation may be required. In a vibrant, democratic country, authoritarian ways of suppressing people’s voices prove to be counterproductive. It may be recalled that the law and order situation in Kashmir worsened in the aftermath of unfair and rigged assembly elections of 1987,...

The Goa bench of Bombay High Court stretched the RTI Act's ambit to the maximum when it ruled that a governor's report to the Centre about the political situation in a state could not be kept under wraps and ordered its disclosure upon an application under the transparency law.  This has sent shock waves in the power corridors as the Union Cabinet headed by the prime minister relies on the secret...

-EPW   With laws like the AFSPA, when will truth and justice prevail in Jammu and Kashmir? Like all Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) chief ministers after the dreadful years of president’s rule from 1990 to 1996, Omar Abdullah too stands discredited, especially in the wake of the 2010 uprising of the “stone pelters” which was later brutally suppres­sed. A widely held opinion in the Kashmir Valley is that the chief minister, whether of...

Most people in the world live in countries with some kind of "right-to-know" law that promises access to various categories of government information. What effect does this have in practice? Not much in many cases, according to a survey released today by the international news agency Associated Press. In an attempt at a global round-robin research exercise, its journalists submitted requests about terror arrests and convictions to 105 states that give citizens...