The promise made by UPA II that it will ensure food security for Indians through legislation that guarantees the Right to Food seems, in its view, to have been an error. In a multi-stage process that reflects the pulls and pressures within the policy-making elite, the Food Security Bill has been diluted so much that it marks a reversal rather than an advance compared to the status quo. Let us...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

The Centre released Rs 1.08 lakh crore to states under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme since February 2006 but did not carry out account auditing at any level, the government told the Supreme Court on Friday. This admission by the Union of India meant violation of the intent of Section 24 of the Act, which says, "The central government may, in consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor General...

If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

Swami Aseemanand is the latest big name in the "Hindutva" terror web blamed for a series of blasts; starting with Samjhauta Express in 2007 to the ones at shrines in Hyderabad, Ajmer and Malegaon. The 58-year-old, whose real name is Jatin Chatterjee, is best known for reconverting tribals in the remote Dangs area of Gujarat from Christianity to Hinduism. But as the anti-terrorist squad and then the National Investigation Agency...