Parliament must use budget session to discuss key pending bills The budget session of Parliament begins today. The last few sessions have been characterised by disruptions and consequent loss of productive time. To see one indicator, the 15th Lok Sabha, half-way through its term, has lost 30 per cent of scheduled time — the worst ever. As a result, many important bills have been pending. It is to be seen whether...

In a spate of recent cases in Punjab, information seekers are being turned away by public institutions on the ground that they are not covered under the RTI Act, and are not obliged to share information about their functioning. This despite the fact that almost all these institutions have received financial aid from the state government.   In nearly all such cases, the information seekers had to knock the doors of Information...

-The Hindustan Times MPs, who already get R5 crore each to develop their constituencies, suddenly have more funds to dip into. The government has made available to them money under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), its flagship livelihood programme. The statistics and programme implementation ministry, which monitors the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS), has decided to converge the fund with MGNREGA after representations from MPs,...

Corruption and government apathy may not be hurting MNREGS as much as well-intentioned tinkering There is growing concern that the Centre’s allocation for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) is dropping off. Correspondingly, the average number of days of work created in some of the states is dropping sharply. This decline in the spending of MNREGS money is not a one-off event but has been happening over the...

-The Economic Times A panel headed by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, has suggested all government payments above Rs 1,000 be gradually made or received electronically to cut graft, and bring about greater transparency and accountability.  The panel has also recommended creation of a network of 10 lakh interoperable micro-ATMs operated by business correspondents to allow people to access their accounts at their own convenience and said...