Accelerating the process of framing a National Food Security Bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday convened a high-level meeting with his senior Cabinet colleagues to discuss aspects of the Bill and the recommendations made by the National Advisory Council (NAC).At the centre of the discussions was a letter written by NAC chairperson Sonia Gandhi to the Prime Minister on merging the Rural Development Ministry's exercise for identification of the...

NIIRA RADIA, the lobbyist at the heart of India’s audacious multi-billion telecom swindle, inaugurated a Krishna temple she funded in south Delhi on her birthday — that, interestingly, coincides with Indira Gandhi’s. Those present on the occasion said Radia prayed for long, presumably seeking divine intervention to wriggle out of the country’s biggest scandal. Before the temple visit, notices from the country’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), Income Tax (IT) Department and the...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...

Unfortunate though it may seem, many Indians only identify with Ladakh because of the popularity of Three Idiots and the progressive school there which Aamir Khan has now gone to assist. We tend to forget that it is part of Jammu and Kashmir because the unrest in the valley obscures everything else. Ladakh is often described as a cold desert, with scanty rainfall, which is why Leh and its environs were...