Public can lodge complaints against judges with a national oversight committee The bill will mandate judges to declare assets and liabilities Oversight committee to be headed by a retired Chief Justice of India The Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved a bill providing for a mechanism to deal with complaints against judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court. The Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill sets judicial standards and makes judges accountable for their...

The Congress today said activists and NGOs did not have a monopoly over the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Former Congress MP from Gujarat, Madhusudan Mistry, said activists had no business questioning the credibility of politicians like him on NREGA. He was referring to a note circulated by Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze at a meeting of the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC) last month. The note referred to a...

Is the government trying to push a new land Acquisition Bill without addressing the concerns of the deprived people who stand to lose their livelihoods? Peoples’ movements and social action groups have charged that the cash-based Haryana and Mayawati models of land acquisition are equally ‘dangerous’ for the landless and the deprived people who get uprooted without compensation or rehabilitation. People’s movements have been demanding that instead of bringing Land...

In the last few years in different parts of India the issue of land acquisition has become politically explosive.  This isn’t surprising as land, one of the few assets possessed by large numbers of people, particularly in rural India, is rising disproportionately in potential value as commercial and industrial development picks up, as there is never a dearth of real estate magnates, land speculators, local mafia, their political patrons and...

An initiative to set up information technology (IT) kiosks to offer government services in rural India is likely to miss its expanded target of establishing 250,000 centres because of delays in releasing funds. The scheme to set up 100,000 common service centres (CSCs), through which villagers would be able to access a host of services, was launched in 2006. In June 2009, President Pratibha Patil said in her inaugural address to the...