A Non-Resident Indian (NRI) will be produced in a court on Wednesday following his arrest on Tuesday night for allegedly murdering his teenaged step-daughter in a suspected case of honour killing. Mehtab Singh was arrested after the police got a tip-off that he had brought his step-daughter Amritpal Kaur, 17, from Brussels, Belgium, earlier this month and clandestinely cremated her here after saying that she died of food poisoning. Police officials said...

Shortfall in sowing of paddy, pulses and coarse cereals Union Agriculture Ministry officials are keeping their fingers crossed for the southwest monsoon to revive in parts of northern and central India before putting in place a contingency plan for kharif (paddy) sowing. So far there has been a shortfall in sowing of paddy, pulses and coarse cereals compared to last year, which was a drought year, resulting in a kharif output deficit...

Furious debates among policymakers about the proposed national food security law largely revolve around its financial repercussions. The Planning Commission is finally coming around to accepting the Tendulkar Committee’s estimates of 37.2 per cent BPL population or 8.5 crore BPL households. The fiscal burden in implementing the food security law for 37.5 per cent BPL population, with each household being provided 35 kg food grains, is estimated to be Rs...

India has been lauded for its remarkable overall economic growth of over 8% over the last five years. But despite this high and relatively stable growth, India's underbelly is soft. The agriculture sector is performing below expectations, with growth rate of around 2.8%, it is way below the Eleventh Plan target of 4%. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that 22% of India's population is undernourished. Child malnutrition is...

The Lokayukta is the “government’s conscience”, an anti-corruption ombudsman organised at the state-level and born out of a need felt among the country’s statesmen to instill a sense of public confidence in the transparency of the administrative machinery. Legal experts say that the “best and the worst” of the Lokayukta organisation is that the success of the entire mechanism depends solely on the “personal qualities such as the image, caliber, drive,...