-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fertilizer minister Srikant Jena may keep claiming that annually 30 lakh tonne of highly subsidized urea for agriculture is being smuggled to chemical factories, but the government says states have reported only 24 such cases since 2010-11. Jena had recently said at a conference of Indian Fertilizer Association (IFA) that there are serious signs of mismanagement in an information technology-driven era when targeted farmers can be...

-PTI The year 2012 saw a total of 39,512 cases registered under the SC/ST Act while the conviction rate in those stood at a dismal 23.8 per cent, Parliament was told. Sharing the data on cases under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act), 1989, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment added that 83.1 per cent of these cases were pending in courts. According to the report, 10 states...

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Probably, this can be said about the ‘Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2012', which carries the latest figures on the social sector by far. The report has provided some interesting trends in child mortality indicators for India and its bigger states during 2012 (see the links below). It says that states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, which have consistently...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Satyendra Dubey, Amit Jethwa, Ram Thakur, Shimbhu Bishnoi, Satish Shetty, Lalit Mehta, Lingaraju, Nandi Singh - some of the names ring a bell, others don't. Some became primetime news, others were buried in barely noticeable corners of newspapers. But they all belong to the select tribe of whistleblowers killed in line of duty for daring to expose corruption. On Monday, their friends and relatives came from...

-Outlook The real story of a ‘decisive' UPA blowing away the eight-year cloud around Posco's project Bend It Like Moily Seven reasons why UPA's pre-poll green clearance for Posco is more about spiel than steel Posco got green clearance after the sudden removal of MoEF Jayanthi Natarajan, who was reluctant to sign on the file. The nod came days before South Korean President Park Geun-hye's visit;...