-The Times of India NEW DELHI: At the very fag end of the forgettable existence of the 15th Lok Sabha, Parliament on Friday passed the Whistleblower Protection Bill. The Rajya Sabha cleared this crucial anti-corruption law a good two years after it was passed by the Lok Sabha. The delay was not because the elders brought some new wisdom to the proposed law. In fact, the Bill, seeking to ensure the safety...
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Only 24 cases of diversion of subsidized urea since 2010: Govt -Dipak Kumar Dash
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fertilizer minister Srikant Jena may keep claiming that annually 30 lakh tonne of highly subsidized urea for agriculture is being smuggled to chemical factories, but the government says states have reported only 24 such cases since 2010-11. Jena had recently said at a conference of Indian Fertilizer Association (IFA) that there are serious signs of mismanagement in an information technology-driven era when targeted farmers can be...
More »Whose loo? Why 600 million Indians still defecate in the open-Ierene Francis
-TheAlternative.in Over 600 million Indians have no access to toilets - if you line up the countries where open defecation is practised, India leads and also has more than twice the number as the next 18 countries with no access to toilets. The proportion is worse in rural India - where 68% of rural households don't have their own toilets (Source:NSSO, WHO). Why is open defecation an issue? Open defecation has been linked...
More »Japanese biopiracy of our Ballia barley-Latha Jishnu
-Down to Earth Japan's Sapporo brewery patents Indian barley gene without giving benefit to farmers Ballia district, the easternmost part of Uttar Pradesh, is a flood-prone area that extends towards Bihar from the confluence of the Ganga and the Ghaghra. Over decades, its farmers, mostly marginal and small, have been cultivating barley, exchanging its seeds, improving the varieties and giving these to a government project to cull the best of the lot....
More »ILO says poor laws aid the abuse of maids -Neetu Chandra
-DailyMail.Co.Uk Millions of domestic workers in Indian homes are a part of an informal and "invisible" workforce due to absence of a specific legislation meant for their protection, the International Labour Organisation said on Wednesday. The number of maids has gone up by nearly 70 per cent from 2001 to 2010 with an estimated 10 million maids and nannies in India, the ILO says. According to the National Sample Survey (NSS) 2004-05, there...
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