States are expected to take responsibility for this, but the Bill ignores the nutritional crisis altogether K V Thomas Minister for Food The inclusion of iron supplements, protein, dairy supplements and vegetables can be done gradually - this Bill is just the beginning The food security Bill will certainly ensure nutrition but it is the states that have to take steps for that. The draft Bill approved recently by the Group of Ministers is...

The Right to Information Act was the great white hope of Indian citizens who are consistently denied rightful information. Not only does it specify that most information in the public domain would be provided to citizens by right, but it also ensured that failure to do so by the bloated bureaucracy would result in penalties for erring officials. Trust the government, though, to subvert its own good intentions. The state government has...

Terming the Right to Education Act as an "attack" on the sovereignty of madarsas and other minority institutions, Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband today said it will oppose it. "The seminary will strongly protest the move to snatch rights of madarsas through RTE and it is with the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which is already opposing it," newly-appointed vice-chancellor Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani told PTI. He said the Act poses...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) — at the initiative of which the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was rolled out in UPA-I — is taking a fresh look at how to strengthen it. The NAC wants the scheme to move from its “relief work mode” to one that would blend “natural resources and labour to build productive assets.” When the NAC meets here on Thursday, the Deep...

In a setback to the Election Commission (EC), its pilot poll conducted on Sunday to establish a paper trail for electronic voting machines (EVMs) reported significant errors. Preliminary results of the EC pilot poll indicated discrepancies between votes polled in EVMs and the paper trail, according to three people involved and familiar with the testing process. Two of them are EC officials who confirmed the mismatch, but did not give any...