-Express News Service   The Centre said on Monday the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill would include the recommendations made by Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), and, once passed, the Legislation would ensure that there are “no more Singurs” in the country. The NAC has prescribed a seven-point test for a having a humane Legislation on land acquisition and rehabilitation. “The recent recommendations of the NAC will be included in the Land...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

One of the most shameful pieces of Legislation in our penal code is the continuance of ‘Sedition’ in Section 124A of the Penal Code which provides that whoever excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law in India shall be punished with imprison-ment for life. The expression disaffection includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity. This provision was included by the British Government in 1870 as...

The roller-coaster ride of the government-civil society joint drafting committee on the Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill has ended in a draw, but left both sides badly injured. Whether the tie will be broken when they present their separate recommendations to a proposed all-party committee in July remains an open question. Yet, this is a good time to draw up a balance-sheet of the government's first-ever effort to take on board civil...

Last week, an enterprising resident welfare association in Ghaziabad organised a registration camp for unique identification (UID) numbers. It found people queuing up till midnight for a week with infants, grandmothers and some with domestic workers in tow. No one had a clue as to how UID was different from the several other identity documents each of them had been scrupulously accumulating and treasuring. They were initially informed that all they...