As news of record food grain production trickled from the corridors of the agriculture ministry, officials of the storage wing in the adjoining food ministry began working overtime to save the department the embarrassment of plenty. Food minister KV Thomas is under pressure to ensure that the toil of farmers is not wasted. "It's my duty to make sure that food grains don't rot. We are on our way to create...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Bofors 'deep throat' gives BJP chance to target govt
-PTI BJP Parliamentary Party on Wednesday decided to rake up the Bofors pay-offs issue in Parliament in wake of fresh allegations that the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi may have soft-pedalled the probe to protect Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi. Leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley spoke during the Parliamentary Party meeting about the allegations related to the Bofors scam made by former Swedish police chief Sten Lindstrom in an interview. "The...
More »CAG rues huge central funds to local bodies-Devesh Kumar
A Comptroller and Auditor-General of India report has expressed dismay over the rising share of funds disbursed by various ministries to local bodies and NGOs in 2010-11. The CAG report on the accounts of the Union government was tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. "An analysis of plan expenditure revealed that 77% of the total plan expenditure was in the form of grants-in-aid payment,'' the report stated. "In five of the ten...
More »Public policy in a knowledge society-Shiv Visvanathan
Imagine you are a citizen racing across newspapers rapid fire. As you flip the pages you run across events like the Vedanta mining case, the Koodankulam nuclear controversy, the debate on poverty and reports about climate change. Each of these can be a life-threatening event and none of them have a life support system of knowledge which allows them to be debated in the open. The basic information comes from...
More »Indian tax system, black money and tax havens-PR Srinivasan
Drug smugglers and third-world dictators laundering ill-gotten wealth through secretive banking systems in tax havens is an anachronistic image from crime novels. Leveraging US' remarkable success in compelling tax havens to block terrorist financing, the G20/OECD have successfully persuaded tax havens to improve tax transparency and participate in an international regime of information exchange. All tax havens have committed to OECD standards for tax transparency and are executing Tax Information Exchange...
More »