-Hindustan Times The government appears to be having second thoughts about throwing the rulebook at officials who are a little late to work, as long as they do their job well and don’t mind staying back if there is a deadline to meet. The department of personnel & training (DoPT) had last year made it mandatory for central government offices in Delhi to implement the Aadhaar-based biometric attendance system from January 1,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court has ruled that an MLA or MP who enters into a business contract with the government stands automatically disqualified, upholding the disqualification of BJP legislator Bajrang Bahadur Singh who won the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections from Pharenda constituency. The apex court rejected Singh's argument that the disqualification would arise only if a contractor having a subsisting contract contests an election, not when a legislator...

-The Telegraph Shillong: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has "disapproved" of the Meghalaya government's not formulating appropriate policies and guidelines for coal mining while it found "no merit" in the government's defence for its inability to execute the tribunal's orders. "Without hesitation, we record our disapproval for the said conduct of the state of Meghalaya in not formulating appropriate policy and guidelines despite orders of the tribunal, even after lapse of a...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The law commission has opposed the concept of compulsory voting, saying it is "highly undesirable", and recommended that either the President or a governor - and not the Speaker - should decide whether to disqualify a lawmaker who switches sides. The recommendations are among a series of electoral reforms that the commission, headed by retired Delhi High Court Chief Justice A.P. Shah, has suggested in a report it...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...