-The Telegraph In government report cards on babus, “adequate” will now mean “inadequate” and “satisfactory” signify “unsatisfactory”. No, India’s government isn’t turning into a doublespeak-driven Orwellian Big Brother; nor is it taking lessons in obfuscation from Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister fame. What it has done, for the first time, is to define “non-performance” on the part of senior bureaucrats, nudging states to prematurely retire those whose annual reports routinely judge their...

-The Business Standard When the anti-Posco brigade celebrated the seventh anniversary of their agitation against the mega steel venture of the South Korean behemoth at Dhinkia near Paradip in Odisha last week, the noise they made against the project was drowned by the murmurs of a split in their ranks. After fighting against the project for the last seven years, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS) seems to be disintegrating, with many of...

The State finds a handy tool in a colonial law to quell dissent Wrong Arm Of The Law   Why ‘sedition’ rings hollow in India 2012 The law Section 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code, 1870; non-bailable offence The definition Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government...

-The Times of India RANCHI: Complying with the provisions of Schedule V of the Indian Constitution, governor Syed Ahmed on Wednesday invited traditional tribal chiefs to the Raj Bhavan and introduced them to the newly opened cell of the Raj Bhavan that would deal with the issues relating to tribals in Schedule Areas. Expediting his role as the administrator of Scheduled Areas, Ahmed assured tribal leaders not only to pay attention to...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...