-The Economic Times The Union Cabinet is expected to take up for approval a bill that deals with manual scavenging and rehabilitation of scavengers.  For nearly two years now, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has been advocating for a new law to deal with the indignities of manual scavenging and for their rehabilitation. Gandhi had, in November 2010, written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking the government to take steps to...

-The Economic Times National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy has criticised the government for failing to deliver on land reforms. Criticising the UPA dispensation for not convening a single meeting of the National Land Reforms Council (NLRC) since it was constituted over four years ago, Roy on Monday told ET that this reflected an "absolute lack of intent and the symbolic manner in which governments respond to some the most basic...

Gosikhurd was sanctioned in 1983 and meant to irrigate 2.5 lakh hectares in Vidarbha As Manikrao Gedam sits outside his three-room house, he wonders how he has benefited by giving up his 10 acres for the Gosikhurd irrigation project at Bhandara in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region. For that matter, he wonders what anyone has gained from it. Today, he has nothing else, but the house in a resettlement colony; his sons are unemployed; and...

-The Hindustan Times Home minister P Chidambaram on Thursday got the cabinet’s backing to nudge the Nandan Nilekani-led Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to accept biometric data collected under the National Population Register (NPR) for issuing Aadhaar numbers. The cabinet committee’s advice came in the backdrop of Chidambaram complaining to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week that the NPR project was “almost at a standstill” due to UIDAI’s refusal to accept...

There are major issues at stake in the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development to be held on 20-22 June. Yet governments of developing countries have not given adequate importance to the run-up to the conference. As has happened in the climate change negotiations, the outcome draft now under negotiation shows a concerted move to rewrite the terms of global environmental governance. There is an attempt to push through the decidedly...