When activists of the Right to Food campaign attacked Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia over the Rs 32 per capita per day cut-off for poverty line, Vijay Jawandhia — a farm activist from Vidarbha — asked a counter question: “Why are you happy with a minimum wage of Rs 100 per labourer per day under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), when Salaries have been revised several...

When the boulders started raining down, the toil for survival turned into a trek for staying alive. At least a thousand labourers, many of them from Bengal, fled the site of the 1,200MW Teesta Stage-III hydel power project in Chungthang, North Sikkim, after seeing several fellow workers crushed by hurtling rocks. Last Sunday’s 6.9-magnitude quake, which has claimed over a 100 lives, didn’t just leave a trail of death; it snapped livelihoods...

It will be offered as National Health Package for all common conditions Strongly recommending a re-configuration of the entire health system where the government will have a major role to play, a high level expert group on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has proposed making health care an entitlement to every citizen. The group suggested that health care be offered as a National Health Package (NHP) covering all common conditions and high-impact health...

The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...

Barely a month after being appointed Karnataka's anti-corruption ombudsman, Lokayukta Shivaraj V. Patil finds himself embroiled in allegations of impropriety in acquiring valuable sites in Bangalore. He was allotted a 9,600-sq.ft. plot at Allasandra in the Karnataka State Judicial Department Employees' House Building Cooperative Society in September 1994 and his wife was allotted a 4,012-sq.ft. plot at Nagawara in the Vyalikaval House Building Cooperative Society in October 2006. Documents available with The...