-The Telegraph   New laws are often brought in without assessing their judicial and financial impact. The result is poor implementation, says Seetha Call it collateral damage. According to newspaper reports, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has written to the Prime Minister asking for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to be put on hold during the peak season of agricultural operations. With a guaranteed income of Rs 100 a day for at...

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...

Buying and running cars and two-wheelers could soon become a costly affair with a Planning Commission working group suggesting a green surcharge of Rs 2 on every litre of petrol, a green cess of 3% of the annual insured value of all private vehicles and a steep urban transport tax to be collected at the time of purchase of private vehicles.  The panel, headed by Delhi Metro chief E Sreedharan, has...

How deluded we are when we think that when an important piece of legislation is introduced, policymakers carefully scrutinise it for some room for improvement. Indian democracy is good at passing progressive-sounding legislation that becomes unpopular later for poor implementation and a consequent feeling of letdown and therefore resentment. Often the problems of poor implementation that surface later stem from small mistakes in design that could have been corrected at...

-The Telegraph   The corruption scandals surrounding the Commonwealth Games may have been a blot on India’s political class, but that has not stopped them from asking for a share in the Games Village flats. Samajwadi Lok Sabha member Shailender Kumar today demanded an MPs’ quota in the allotment of the 715 unsold Games flats, the cheapest of which would fetch at least Rs 1 crore in the market. The other House members...