If the political system were clean and non-corrupt, the poor and downtrodden including Dalits would get all benefits fully and their living standard would automatically go up, said Prakash Yashwant Ambedkar, grandson of B.R. Ambedkar. He was addressing a district-level meeting of India Kudiyarsu Katchi held here on Sunday evening. The country have enough resources and component for Adi Dravida welfare in the State was around Rs.1,700 crore. If the government...

After a gap of five months, the West Bengal Information Commission held a meeting on Monday. But even as chief information commissioner (CIC) Sujit Sarkar promised to "streamline" things, the panel's performance since its inception in 2005 has been nothing to write home about. Among those who keenly studied implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005, in Bengal is Magsaysay awardee Arvind Kejriwal. Findings by Kejriwal's Public Cause Research...

The implementation of a landmark forest rights Act, which in 2006 overturned several colonial-era laws in India that denied forest dwellers entitlements to land and other resources, has been “terrible”, an official panel has said.   The national committee, established in April last year by the tribal affairs and environment and forests ministries, visited 17 states in seven months and released its report on Monday. “Our site visits show the implementation has been...

At a time when ordinary money suits and cheque bounce cases are taking years for settlement, lok adalats in Tamil Nadu have set a new record this year by quietly disposing of more than 33,000 cases involving Rs 247 crore upto October 2010. The Tamil Nadu State Legal Services Authority (TNSLSA), headed by its executive chairman justice Elipe Dharma Rao, conducted a total of 4,579 lok adalats and heard more than...

Tamil Nadu has become the second largest state after Andhra Pradesh in the self-help group (SHG)-bank linkage programme launched by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard). In the state, 209,197 SHGs were credit linked with a financial assistance of Rs 2,791.65 crore in 2009-10, taking the cumulative number of SHGs credit linked to 852,791 (including repeat doses) with a bank loan of Rs 9,394.70 crore. Nabard said that a...