Releasing the election manifesto here on Wednesday, West Bengal Left Front Committee Chairman Biman Bose said the eighth Left Front government will focus on “agriculture, industry, peace, democracy and progress,” in the State if it returns to power. Listing the objectives of the Front in the coming five years, the manifesto states that it wants to ensure that West Bengal is one of the top-ranked States on the three parameters of...

Going with its slogan: “Our money our right,” the Shillong declaration of the 3rd National Right to Information Convention today resolved that the Central Government must subject “all public expenditure under social audit.” It was by far one of the most crucial of the other 11 resolutions passed in the Shillong Declaration and was only included after the strong insistence of RTI activist, Aruna Roy. She was amply supported by some...

“Budget is more than a document of income and expenditure. People expect it to tackle the twin problems of poverty and social injustice while ensuring better income and standard of living.” Country’s first woman Finance Minister of any state government, Upinderjit Kaur, said this while presenting her first budget and last of the present Akali-BJP government on Monday. With the state slated to go to polls early next year, the Rs...

About 6,348 tons of foodgrain stored in various government outlets across the country were damaged primarily due to storage pest attack and leakages in godowns in 2010-11, a fact which does not go down well for the country's food security. “The foodgrain get damaged due to various reasons such as storage pest attack, leakages in godowns, procurement of poor quality stocks, during movement of stocks, exposure to rains, floods, etc,” Union...

Why don’t we see more Indian language content on the internet? For instance, there are over 200 odd million people who can read and write in Hindi. But Hindi doesn’t figure in any listing of the top ten languages used on the internet globally. Japanese, a cussedly difficult language to read or write, makes it to the top five. This, from a country with less than one-tenth the population of India. It...