-PTI Chennai: Flaying the Centre for "unilaterally" and "hastily" promulgating the National Food Security Ordinance 2013, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa on Saturday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to replace the ordinance with a Bill which addresses the state's concerns. "The union Government has unilaterally and hastily promulgated the National Food Security Ordinance, 2013. Though the Ordinance claims to provide food security to all, unfortunately, contrary to such a claim, there...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: When the Union cabinet yesterday decided to amend the Right to Information Act to exempt political parties from its ambit, it argued that citizens already have several legal avenues to find out about the donations the parties receive and details of their poll candidates. The cabinet approved the draft bill to be introduced in the coming Parliament session to amend the 2005 act, excluding political parties from the...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Taking note of a report published in Newsline on Wednesday, the Delhi High Court has asked the Delhi government and the three civic agencies to look into the issue of why the midday meals supplied to students in schools run by the three civic agencies of the capital are not up to the prescribed standards. The High Court bench of Acting Chief Justice Badar Durrez Ahmad and...

Ashish Bose coined the term BIMARU in a paper to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s to highlight the economic backwardness of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. He tells Somesh Jha he is not inspired by the Planning Commission’s bogus poverty figures. He says it is time the commission wound up. Excerpts:   * You coined the term 'BIMARU', but these states performed well in alleviating poverty in...

-The Hindustan Times The Narendra Modi government has ‘prima facie' discriminated against the 500-member Sikh community in Kutch, a report by the National Commission for Minorities says. The government had ordered the Sikhs to sell their land and return to Punjab because they were not Gujaratis, citing the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1948. The commission strongly disapproved of the interpretation that only Gujarati farmers could own or buy land in the...