A rural Indian spending Rs. 22.50 a day would not be considered poor by a Planning Commission whose Deputy Chairman's foreign trips between May and October last year cost a daily average of Rs. 2.02 lakh Pranab Mukherjee's stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the Finance Ministry even...

The row over a cartoon featuring Dalit leader Ambedkar shows a lack of critical thinking in the Indian polity. The cartoon by Shankar Pillai that caused such pandemonium in the Indian Parliament on 11 May 2012 when various Dalit and non-Dalit members demanded its omission from a Class IX textbook was originally published in 1949. It depicts Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar with a whip riding a snail entitled ‘Constitution’...

-Express News Service Bowing to pressure from opposition parties and women’s rights organisations, the union cabinet today cleared some more amendments to the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill to give women a clearly-defined share in their husband’s “immovable residential property” — including that acquired before marriage — in divorce cases. If passed, the amended Bill would allow “equal share of residential property” to the wife and children. The wife’s share will be decided...

Under fire from all quarters for its inability to tackle the problem of black money, the government plans to focus on the real estate and gold and jewellery sectors to stanch the movement of unaccounted funds. The proposed white paper on black money, to be tabled in Parliament’s current session, is likely to propose a debate on “offshore voluntary compliance” for tax evaders with large sums stashed abroad, officials involved in...

-The Indian Express Multiple stakeholders in internet governance may be a good idea. But who’s India to talk? Who should run the internet? States and corporations have long struggled over the question. Last October, India proposed a new model of internet governance — a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies, which shifts control to elected governments, advised by experts, international organisations and civil society, under the UN umbrella. This would invert the current...