-First Post They came in waves, like silent armies that move in the night. Each of the Congress Ministers and party leaders who were seen studio-hopping or otherwise implanting themselves in front of cameras late on Friday had been assigned a specific role: to defend the First Family of Indian politics against the most audacious allegation of corruption levelled by Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan, the two Johnny-come-latelys to the world...

-The Hindu From now on, damage to crops due to extreme cold or frost will be considered a natural calamity and the affected farmers will be eligible for financial relief from the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) or the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF). The Union Cabinet, at a meeting on Thursday, approved the recommendation of the Group of Ministers (GoM) on Drought to this effect. So far, crops damaged in natural...

-EPW   The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes. The context for the Planning Commission’s (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line – Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban...

It would have meant endless sorties and waste of fuel for choppers but for the combined technology of GIS and GPS used by the forest department to map wildlife areas that gave the pilots the much-needed coordinates to carry out relief operations in the almost inaccessible Dzongu. Crafted by the forest department to prepare maps meant for delineation, protection and management of wildlife areas, the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global...

The Pune bench of the State Information Commissioner (SIC) has been witnessing a deluge of second appeals. A majority of these appeals, interestingly, have been filed by only a handful of people. Since the establishment of the Pune bench of the SIC in February 2007, 938 second appeals have been filed by 97 individuals. RTI activists claim this habit of filing multiple appeals is a major cause for the rise in pendency...