What lies behind Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s note to the prime minister asking for a suspension of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, for short) for three months a year? The obvious reason is that the big farmers’ lobby he represents is unhappy that NREGA has raised wages in rural areas and labour cannot be enticed to work for less. Under NREGA, labourers get paid at least Rs...
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Status Update? Bad by Debarshi Dasgupta
Assailed from all sides, does the UPA really hope to recover its ‘image’ by muzzling online dissent? Kapil Sibal ko gussa kyon aata hai? Butt of online jokes: Politicians in 'tweaked' cinematic avatars. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The UPA government has made it something of a fine art. Hardly had the ruckus over the decision to open up the retail sector to FDI died down than...
More »Cacophony Colonnade by Saba Naqvi
Our democracy is creaking, but it works—nominally at least. What it needs is not dilution, but deepening. When “Too Much Democracy” Works Pressure in Parliament pushes PM Manmohan Singh to secure the resignation of telecom minister A. Raja in the 2G affair The angst and trials of tribals in the Maoist bastion of Dantewada is sensed in Delhi after the media highlights their plight People power at the sites of...
More »Hate speech must be blocked, says Sibal by Praveen Swami and Sujay Mehdudia
In an interview to The Hindu, he says Internet companies left him with no choice Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has defended his demand that global internet companies block some content from sites they operate, saying he had been left with no choice after the companies refused to delete incendiary hate-speech published on their social-networking websites. In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Mr. Sibal said Facebook,...
More »Uncle dictates, cyber boys dispose
-The Telegraph Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have refused to buckle under pressure from the Indian government to take down content that telecom minister Kapil Sibal and the babus on Raisina Hill find objectionable. Sibal told reporters the government wanted the Big Boys of Cyberspace to remove “abusive” comments and images that could ignite a tinderbox of passions in the country but they had refused to do so...
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