The issue regarding the seemingly poor response to the national rural employment guarantee scheme ( NREGS) of the central government dominated the proceedings of the gram sabha of the Chandor village panchayat held on Sunday. It was pointed out that several cardholders under the UPA government's flagship project had later failed to undertake the work allotted to them, thus crippling the progress of the scheme in the village. The program officer...

Aruna Roy, a Magsaysay award winner former bureaucrat, was closely involved in the drafting of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. As a member of the UPA's National Advisory Council (NAC), among other things, she has been conveying to the government the views of civil society on the proposed changes in the transparency act. On the sidelines of 3rd national convention of National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, held...

In letters to Prime Minister, he pitches for the project to continue and vouches for rehabilitation Digvijay urged Manmohan to get Environment Ministry to withdraw order suspending work He also said the State had made substantial progress in rehabilitation While he seldom misses an opportunity to attack the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government in Madhya Pradesh, documents recently accessed through the Right to Information Act show that the former Chief Minister and AICC...

“While the UPA has focused on bettering the lot of the Dalit community, it is dominated by upper caste Hindus, very few of whom are genuinely concerned about the plight of dalits,” the American Embassy said in a cable sent under the name of Ambassador David Mulford on June 22, 2005 ( 35177: confidential), and accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks. ‘Little upward mobility' “This ensures that dalits will continue to be...

The new bribery revelations, a rigged process to import reactors and safety-related concerns must lead to the long-blocked scrutiny of the nuclear deal by Parliament. The world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl raises troubling questions about India's plans for a huge expansion of its nuclear power programme through reactor imports. Given its low per-capita energy consumption, India must generate far more electricity to economically advance. So it needs more nuclear-generated power....