The five-member Empowered Committee, headed by the former Chief Justice of India A.S. Anand, at its meeting here on Monday, will examine the reports it has received from various agencies it constituted to go into the safety of the Mullaperiyar dam in Kerala. In December last, the committee conducted a spot inspection of the dam. It also heard the views of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Centre on the issues framed...
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All government welfare schemes to undergo Supreme Court’s anti-corruption test by Dhananjay Mahapatra
-The Times of India The Supreme Court on Friday ordered an investigation into whether the benefits of government's welfare programmes like NREGA were reaching the intended beneficiaries and to fix accountability for ensuring that they do, in what is going to be a gigantic exercise. A bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya appointed senior advocate Indu Malhotra as amicus curiae and asked her to study the details...
More »FDI row: India Inc's overseas retail biz on high FDI by Pradeep Thakur
While the government may be finding it difficult to get its FDI in multi-brand retail pass the test of Parliament, India Inc has been pledging huge investments in wholesale and retail trade abroad, including in countries like the US and the UK. In the 2010-11 fiscal, investments of Indian companies in wholesale and retail trade overseas went up 78% as compared to the previous year - up from $1,052 million in...
More »Free speech and Indian Dionysius' by Karan Singh Tyagi
Plutarch's Life of Dion contains an interesting anecdote of Dionysius, an avowed and established tyrant, killing his captain, Marsyas. Marsyas had dreamt of cutting Dionysius's throat, and Dionysius killed Marsyas on account of his dream. He based his decision on the assumption that Marsyas would not have dreamt of such a thing by night if he had not thought of it by day. In his seminal work The Spirit of Laws...
More »Veil off fishing with poison
-The Telegraph The mass mortality of fish in the Karala river has blown the lid off a toxic secret: poison is used to kill some of the catch that makes its way to several homes in Bengal. In the face of raids by officials to seize dead fish in Jalpaiguri, some fishermen today admitted that they use a pesticide called Thiodan to kill fish that are eventually sold in the markets. Lab tests...
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