Should the Central government run schools, crèches, pre-schools, dispensaries, employment schemes, the buying and selling of food grains, and build houses, not to speak of selling milk as it does in Delhi? Though the states seem to have taken it as their fate to have schemes on state subjects like education, agriculture and so on tailored for them by the Centre, as if in distrust of the states’ capability to think...

The Chhattisgarh government is not content with a life term for Binayak Sen for sedition. It wants the rights activist to be convicted for conspiring to wage war against the state. In a criminal appeal filed in the high court, the state has challenged a Raipur sessions court's acquittal of Sen and two others under Section 121 A of the IPC, which deals with hatching conspiracy to wage war or...

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar recently alleged that Monsanto, the Union environment ministry’s genetic engineering approval committee (GEAC) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had colluded to start trials of genetically modified maize in Bihar before clearance from the environment ministry and the state government. The charge is significant: Nitish says ICAR’s experimental farms in Bihar did not maintain the stipulated “isolation distance” from normal farmland, meant to...

By all indications, FDI in multi-brand retail is a fait accompli. Or so we have been told time and again by everyone, the PM downward. The “question is at what point of time it should be done”. This remark from Pranab Mukherjee in a post-budget TV interview may have revealed that the debate has moved beyond whether to permit FDI in multi-brand retailing—the lifeline of small- and medium-sized neighbourhood stores....

The colossal hubris, ignorance and smugness of India’s nuclear czars take one’s breath away. The day Japan’s crisis took a decisive turn for the worse, with an explosion in a third Fukushima reactor and fresh radiation leaks, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sreekumar Banerjee declared that the nuclear crisis “was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section(s) of media”. Nuclear Power Corporation...