-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His Administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill is a first step towards granting functional autonomy to the country's nuclear regulator. THE true independence and functional autonomy of the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been questioned for long. The issue gained further importance in recent months after it was raised in many quarters in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March in Japan. To allay public fears as...

-The Hindu   Autopsies not completed as victims' relatives demand calling specialists from AIIMS in Delhi Tension in the violence-hit Gopalgarh town of Bharatpur district escalated on Monday with a five-member medical team from Jaipur failing to conduct autopsies on five of the eight victims of this past Wednesday's clash following objections raised by their kin. The bodies are kept in the mortuary at Bharatpur Government Hospital. State Chief Secretary S. Ahmed had announced...

This wedding season, anxious grooms from Parsa and Ghatburra, two villages in Chhattisgarh's Surguja district, were offered financial assistance from an unlikely source. Adani Mining Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Ltd, was handing out loans to all those who could prove that the money would be spent on marriage arrangements. “A company official took us to the bank, opened accounts in our names, and gave us cheques for Rs....

The brutality and the intensity of the attack mounted on a gathering of worshippers at the Jama Masjid in Gopalgarh by the members of a community on the fateful Wednesday past week was such that the residents of some 40 odd Meo villages dotting Kaman tehsil in Bharatpur are yet to recover from their horror. The Meos, who inhabit the hilly Mewat terrain in Rajasthan and Haryana, are themselves known to...