THE Union agriculture ministry will redraft the seed bill following complaints by MPs, states and farmer groups. Their main grouse is that the bill, which aims to regulate the quality of seeds, does not monitor their prices, crucial for farmers. The Seed Bill 2010 was approved by the Cabinet in March and was to be tabled in the Rajya Sabha in mid-April. Sources in the ministry said MPs and state government...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

Why is Madhya Pradesh ranked so low in the Millennium Development Goals like child and maternal mortality, extreme poverty, hunger and safe drinking water? Social sector allocation has increased only during the last few years. Before 2005, there wasn’t enough money allocated to it when compared to poverty alleviation schemes. Also, it takes time for the benefits of the allocations to reach people and for real change to manifest itself....

The Planning Commission, in a letter to the Punjab government, has expressed “serious concern” about the “rapidly deteriorating situation regarding groundwater” in Punjab, and asked the state to reconsider its policy of free power to farmers, which “is contributing to over drawal” of groundwater. These are unquestionably questions we should be asking. Of course, these questions are embedded in a larger set of issues — the unreformed nature of electricity...

Bhopal cast a pall on Singur today, fed by a cocktail of pollution, panic and Politics. A chemical factory, declared a “fit case for closure” by the state pollution control board (PCB) two months ago, spewed carbon soot-laced smoke this dawn. The plant belongs to Himadri Chemicals and Industries, a company with an annual turnover of over Rs 500 crore and said to be the country’s largest manufacturer of coal tar...