This is the second term of the UPA and till now we have always seen Prime Minister manmohan singh and Sonia Gandhi, the UPA chairperson, working in perfect harmony but NDTV has learnt that there is one issue that they disagree, on that of RTI amendments. It's a rare occasion when the Prime Minister has stood firm and refused Congress president Sonia Gandhi's request. In a letter to UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi...
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Women scheme nod with cut by Charu Sudan Kasturi
The UPA government is ready to launch its promised flagship scheme to streamline the delivery of programmes for women on March 8, after months of internal quibbling involving the President and the women and child development ministry. But the government has agreed to the launch only after whittling down the financial allocations for the scheme to less than 1 per cent of the amount sought by women and child development...
More »The Gene Gun At Your Head by Shoma Chaudhury
IMAGINE THE lowly brinjal you have always known turning into a sci-fi gizmo — with an uncharted potency for good and evil. Imagine a food turned into a pesticide — and you will have a measure of the essential uncertainty around Bt brinjal. When Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced his indefinite moratorium on Bt brinjal on February 9, he halted a juggernaut that could have swept India to a point...
More »Vulnerable sections ignored in Budget allocation: NCDHR by Aarti Dhar
The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) has said that the budget proposals for 2010-11 have ignored the most vulnerable sections of society, particularly the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs). Though there is an increase in the budgets for the Ministries of Tribal Affairs and Social Justice and Empowerment, the overall denial continues to be substantial this year — over Rs.25, 000 crore, said N.Paul Divakar,...
More »On GM food, Govt begins its Jairam damage control
Pushed to a corner by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s peremptory freeze on Bt brinjal, the UPA government took the first step of finding a way out. And it needed the authority of Prime Minister manmohan singh to do that. In a clear enunciation of the government’s policy on GM crops — a policy that got clouded by Ramesh’s rhetoric — the Prime Minister underlined the importance of biotechnology in productivity...
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