Sharad Pawar says many states had asked him not to ban the pesticide Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar is rooting for endosulfan just before the fifth Conference of Parties (COP) of the Stockholm Convention meets in Geneva from April 25 to April 30 to decide the fate of the pesticide. There seems to be a pattern in Pawar’s resistance to banning endosulfan. Replying to a question in the Lok Sabha on February...

THE Tamil Nadu government introduced with much fanfare the samathuva mayanam (common graveyard) concept during the previous Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam regime with the proclaimed goal of ending all caste-based discrimination at burial-cum-cremation grounds. An official announcement was made that panchayats which set up samathuva mayanams would get an “incentive grant” of Rs.1 lakh for promoting communal harmony. A few panchayats had received the incentive when the government appeared to beat a hasty...

This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...

Recently an interesting article appeared in The New York Times on how after the completion of a social audit at Nagarkurnool in Andhra Pradesh, villagers punished a local official for swindling funds allocated to the central government's flagship project, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. The irate villagers tied the official's hands and paraded him around the neighbouring villages. This is not a one-off incident; similar accounts have...

At least 29 of the 66 migrants crushed to death in east Delhi when a building collapsed on Monday night hailed from Bengal. The figure signposts the exodus of an abandoned generation and the inability of a state to retain its young or equip them for a better life elsewhere. The death of so many Bengalis has brought out in the open troubling issues that policymakers — both in the state...