-The Hindustan Times The parliamentary standing committee on rural development is slated to submit on Thursday its report on the much-awaited land acquisition bill — with suggestions for tough norms that would make it very difficult to acquire land for industry. The committee, it is understood, has suggested that ‘public purpose’ be clearly defined to prevent profit-making industries from taking advantage of the law under the guise of producing Public Goods...

A universal pension scheme for social protection must be part of a broader strategy of economic expansion different from the present neoliberal order. INDIA must be one of the worst countries in the world in terms of not providing even minimal social security for most of its people. This is not just a major failure of the development project in the country – it is also a significant cause of...

-The Hindu Demands for a universal pension scheme got bolstered with a large number of underprivileged people including farmers, domestic workers, single women, disabled persons, sex workers and trans-genders from more than 20 States beginning a five-day dharna at Jantar Mantar here on Monday. The campaign for universalisation of Rs.2,000 as monthly pension for every elderly above 60 years in age and does not come under the tax slab is being spearheaded...

Remote controls are identified as technical devices which are used for various purposes ranging from the launching of space-ships to the monitoring of toy cars. But of late, these devices are being used to direct policies for nation states which are formally sovereign. We speak here of the powerful lobby of international credit rating agencies like Standard and Poor's (S&P), which has just delivered its sermon that India is no longer...

MGNREGA can only succeed if politics is taken seriously in the design of accountability mechanisms Does political competition enhance a poor person’s access to anti-poverty initiatives such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA)? Just as some economists believe that competition is an effective way to improve management and productivity, in politics too, some hold that political competition is better than single-party monopoly, because it forces political parties...