The joint drafting committee on the Lokpal bill made some headway on Saturday on contentious procedures for sanction for prosecution of public servants. A broad consensus emerged over the need to review existing laws that have been criticized for shielding corrupt officials. Civil society sources on the panel said the proposed Lokpal may not require permission for prosecution while investigating offenses with amendments being considered to section 19 of the prevention...

A member of the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council today said the delay in enacting the food security law amounted to “corruption”. “The food security bill is delayed. This is corruption,” Aruna Roy said at a seminar here, strongly pitching for legal guarantees on food security to every citizen in the country. The draft bill finalised by the NAC seeks to provide subsidised grain to up to 75 per cent of the...

It was indeed an unusual ''social movement''. A group of ''activists'' who had banded together to draft one version of a bill that would establish a statutory institution to investigate corruption in the political establishment sits in protest demanding the acceptance and passage of its version of the bill. The protest has elements of a social drama inasmuch as it fronts an elderly leader, Anna Hazare, with Gandhian credentials, a...

Who is a civil society member? This question, which has intrigued me for more than 20 years, came up again with the organization of the demonstrations in support of the Lok Pal bill in Delhi and other metropolitan cities. When I asked a friend who had been with the demonstrators at Jantar Mantar about the social composition of the gathering, he said that they were common people from every walk...

Sharad Pawar says many states had asked him not to ban the pesticide Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is rooting for endosulfan just before the fifth Conference of Parties (COP) of the Stockholm Convention meets in Geneva from April 25 to April 30 to decide the fate of the pesticide. There seems to be a pattern in Pawar’s resistance to banning endosulfan. Replying to a question in the Lok Sabha on February...