After land acquisition and food security, the National Advisory Council (NAC) has set its sights farther, this time to monitor programme implementation at panchayats. The council led by Congress president Sonia Gandhi feels the ministry of statistics and programme implementation is not doing enough to monitor the panchayat programmes, while panchayati raj ministry has little say since most programmes are out of its purview. Monitoring panchayats would be part of an...

The West Bengal assembly on Tuesday passed a bill to return to some of the original owners their land in Singur, which had been acquired by the previous Left Front government for the Nano project. In doing so, chief minister Mamata Banerjee kept her pre-poll promise to the electorate, which gave her Trinamool Congress, a resounding majority in the elections. The Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill cites “non-commissioning of the...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has written to the Manmohan Singh government on the issue of manual scavenging: in a letter dated June 9, it has made out a case once again for a new law to end manual scavenging. The letter points out that in a resolution on October 23, 2010, the NAC had expressed its anguish at the official failure to end manual scavenging in the country...

Civil society” has dominated popular discussion for the last few months. It may be hard to recall how rare the use of the term was only some years back. In 2002, when I published a book analysing the role of civil society in preventing, dampening or inciting communal riots, I was asked in a television interview whether I was overstating the power of civil society vis-à-vis the state. And in...

During a meeting between Union Food Minister K V Thomas and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar on Tuesday, apprehensions were reportedly expressed regarding the National Advisory Council (NAC) coming out with its own version of the food security Bill. The government has been in the process of drafting the proposed Bill based on the recommendations of Sonia Gandhi-led NAC. While the meeting was essentially a consultation between the two ministers over various...