This essay describes and compares Parliament and the Supreme Court and examines the relationship between them. Parliament may still be a great institution, but its members are no longer great men. How long can a great institution remain great in the hands of small men? The SC has held its place in the public esteem rather better than the Lok Sabha, despite the occasional allegation of financial impropriety. Parliament, the...

As it is drafted, the Bill actually deprives people, and the State governments, of existing rights on multiple counts. The Food Security Bill finalised by a Group of Ministers should not be accepted by Parliament in its present form. The overriding negative features of the proposed legislation far outweigh its positive initiatives. The framework itself is questionable since the Central government usurps all powers to decide the numbers, criteria and schemes...

Matter begins: What is the impact of the National Rural Employment Guarentee Act on rural wages? That is the question that the pundits are asking today. It's a query which feeds into a larger question. Six years have passed since NREGA became a legal reality. What is its village-level impact? It's a complex question to answer. NREGA undertakes to provide employment to anyone who asks for it. Which makes it...

Mahtab Alam examines the trouble with the steel project and suggests a way out THE PROPOSED mega Posco project and the anti-Posco movement are back in the news after the violence at the proposed site on 16 July. According to the reports I got, on that day, eight platoons of police attacked and lathicharged peaceful protesters in the village of Nuagaon, Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha. The protesters, despite being mostly women, were...

Kalinganagar/Gobindpur: Tata Steel and Posco conceived their high-profile projects in Orissa at around the same time— 2004-05. Both faced similar opposition from land owners and saw long delays in meeting schedules. Tata Steel’s plant is under way with a commissioning deadline of October 2013, while Posco is still stuck at the land-acquisition stage. Nobody really knows when construction will start. In the land-acquisition process—the biggest stumbling block for most new plants—Tata Steel...