With five years to go before the deadline for halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) warn in a report released today that without stepped-up efforts, nearly one billion people will be overlooked. “We all recognize the vital importance of water and sanitation to human health and well-being and their role...

WELL before Budget 2010-11 was presented, inflation had emerged as the principal economic problem in the country. With food-price inflation running at close to 20 per cent, even the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre had been forced to recognise it as a problem that deserved as much attention as the objective of achieving a 9 or 10 per cent rate of growth, if not more. In fact,...

THE sharp criticism of the State administration by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes for perceived inadequacies in enforcing the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and in implementing various welfare measures aimed at empowering Dalits has put the Tamil Nadu government in a tight spot. Despite denials by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, who is also a top leader of the United Progressive Alliance which is...

ON February 12, Meham town in Rohtak district, Haryana, saw a citizens’ convention that was unusual in more than one sense. First, it was being held from the ramparts of the Meham Chaubisi Chabootara, a platform reserved for members of the Meham panchayat (a conglomeration of 24 villages, better known as the Meham Chaubisi). Second, the meeting was not dominated by any one caste. Third, it was a congregation of...

Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi recently took the extraordinary step of unilaterally releasing the minutes of the October 14, 2009 meeting between Union Minister Prithviraj Chavan and Central and State Information Commissioners on a proposal to significantly amend the Right to Information Act, 2005. The meeting's importance lay in the fact that it saw the hopeless isolation of the government side (Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public...