Maharashtra weeded out 2.9 million bogus ration cards last year, launching an identity verification drive to make the system foolproof. Residents had to provide electoral roll numbers, Electricity Bills and rent receipts to receive a ration card. Migrants had to present an official document confirming their change in residence. That led to the exclusion of many poor, homeless and migrant families as they lacked the necessary papers. This is the kind...

Congress President Sonia Gandhi's official residence 10, Janpath has consumed electricity worth more than Rs. 7 lakh in the last three years, a reply to an RTI has revealed. Out of the total bill of Rs. 7.47 lakh, the Lok Sabha Secretariat paid Rs. 7.38 lakh while Gandhi herself paid about Rs. 9000. As per the RTI reply, received from the Lok Sabha Secretariat, 10 Janpath consumed a little over two lakh...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

The Punjab Cabinet on Wednesday rolled back its decision on payment of power bills by farmers and restored the facility of free electricity for their agricultural tubewells with immediate effect. The state government had, earlier this year, introduced a system under which farmers were made to pay a part of the power bills which were to be reimbursed to them as “productivity bonus”. The proposal to roll back the decision was not...

Block vehicular and railway traffic across Punjab, demand relaxation of paddy procurement norms Various factions of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) and organisations of landless labourers blocked the railway traffic at Moga and ten other locations in Punjab on Friday. They also halted the vehicular traffic on many highways, demanding relaxation in the procurement norms of paddy. The protesters claimed that adverse weather conditions had affected the quality of grains, and said...