If reports as appearing in a section of the local media are to be believed, several crores of funds under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) have been siphoned off “under the DAN government”. Detailed charges have been put up by the Nagaland Pradesh Congress Committee (NPCC) against the large scale misuse of public fund under the MGNREGA by the present ‘DAN government”. The charges have been...

The Embassy cable suggests a serious crime was committed on Indian soil to which U.S. diplomats were privy. The Prime Minister cannot cite lame arguments to justify inaction. Since politics is a distraction, consider the following retelling of the WikiLeaks tale. An activist dies in a traffic accident. CCTV footage from a bank nearby suggests he might have been murdered but the case is never investigated properly. Three years later,...

The World Bank and the United Nations have hailed it as one of the best health insurance schemes around the globe. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's Budget called this UPA flagship, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), an 'effective instrument' for providing basic health cover to the poor. Yet, UPA-ruled states have virtually disowned the scheme - just 11% of the scheme's Rs 2.31 crore active beneficiaries are in UPA-run territories, an...

There is a fundamental inequality in the governance arrangement in New Delhi that continues to plague the United Progressive Alliance. Members of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council feel they have the right to criticise the government and its functionaries all the time, while no one in government is willing to return the compliment. In an interview to this newspaper, (March 13) the self-proclaimed father of India’s green...

By all indications, FDI in multi-brand retail is a fait accompli. Or so we have been told time and again by everyone, the PM downward. The “question is at what point of time it should be done”. This remark from Pranab Mukherjee in a post-budget TV interview may have revealed that the debate has moved beyond whether to permit FDI in multi-brand retailing—the lifeline of small- and medium-sized neighbourhood stores....