-Down to Earth After two budgets and Rs 5,300 crore in funding, the Centre's micro irrigation project that promises water to every farmland is not even close to a roll-out The news of deficit monsoons this year has once again left the Centre worried. A concerned prime minister chaired a high-level meeting on June 8 where he emphasised the need to quickly augment the irrigation capacity of the country. But he conveniently...

-Tehelka If governance is his priority, Narendra Modi has to detach politics from welfare schemes. He has to ensure that the locals are treated as critical stakeholders It is a fight that has raged on for a decade. It is a battle to ensure that poor children and deprived pregnant and lactating women get a nutritious diet. It is a war to rightfully implement the grandiose central scheme, Integrated Child Development Services...

-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...

-DNA Mumbai: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an irrigation project? Water? Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the Union Union Ministry for Forests, Environment & Climate Change (MoEF). How else would it have cleared the the Rs 4,845 crore, 23.66 TMC (thousand million cubic feet) Krishna Marathwada Lift Irrigation Scheme (KMLIS) without water availability? The environmental clearance given on 24th June...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Central Vigilance Commission has started an investigation against senior officials of the commerce ministry for 47 missing files of Special Economic Zones allocated to some of the country's top companies. The SEZ files in question went missing from the ministry after the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) began reviewing the concessional land allotment made to the companies in some of the country's favoured...