The Manmohan Singh government's options on keeping a check on the bill for the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA) may shrink further with Parliament's standing committee on finance likely to endorse the states' tally of BPL families pegged at 11.5 crore. The highly contentious issue of enumerating the poor has seen the government differ with the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), which originally considered universal PDS but later curtailed...

Corruption, No. 1 national security threat, is eating into the vitals of the state, enfeebling internal security and crimping foreign policy.  India confronts several pressing national security threats. But only one of them — political corruption — poses an existential threat to the state, which in reality has degenerated into a republic of mega-scandals. The pervasive misuse of public office for private gain is an evil, eating into the vitals...

About 90,000 children die every year in Bihar within the first month of their birth, according to state principal secretary, health, C K Mishra. Inaugurating the first annual convention of National Neonatology Forum (NNF), Bihar chapter, on Sunday, Mishra said out of about 29 lakh children born every year in Bihar, 1.60 lakh die before completing one year of life. Of these, about two-thirds or about 90,000 die within the first...

There is clearly a direct trade-off between exploitation of natural resources and conservation of environment and human habitat . In the past, due to lower environment consciousness, the trade-off was always decided in favour of exploitation. This is deplorable. Yet, environmental fundamentalism can also exact a high cost that will prevent a number of people to remain without access to basic necessities of life. This apparently intractable trade-off has to be resolved....

Has Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), one of India’s best-known peoples’ movements, run out of steam? Or is it still relevant in its new avatar as a force to reckon with? After all, the NBA has failed to achieve its primary Goal of blocking big dams on Narmada, including the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat. The short answer to the question of NBA’s achievement is that it has forced a paradigm...