-The Hindustan Times "My permission is not required nor my opinion is sought in matters relating to tribals. My voice goes unheard," tribal affairs minister V Kishore Chandra Deo told HT, referring to what he called limited powers of his ministry in tribal welfare. The tribal affairs ministry was set up in 1999 for an integrated socio-economic development of the tribals, who account for 10.4 crore of the population. In an embarrassment for...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today filed his nomination papers for the May 30 Rajya Sabha election here but the visit was overshadowed by protests by journalists and the All Assam Students Union. The scribes protested against denial of access to cover the proceedings of the Prime Minister's visit in the Assembly while the AASU said Singh had "failed" Assam despite representing the state since 1991. Such was the intensity of...

-The Times of India The new office will give real time analysis of the government's social programmes, says Jairam Ramesh At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is facing flak for a series of alleged corruption scams, the ministry of rural development that has an annual budget of approximately ` 800 billion has decided to go ahead and create an office of concurrent evaluation. The proposal for a...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: Home to one-fourth of the world's visually-challenged persons, India will play a key role in negotiating a historic international treaty next month that will ensure that the community's access to globally-published material is not stymied by rigid copyright rules. The Extraordinary General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has called a diplomatic conference in June (17th-28 th) 2013 in Marrakesh, Morocco, to conclude the WIPO...

-The Hindu With general elections just a year away, the Union government is keen to project the proposed installation of around 3,000 mobile towers in nine Naxal-affected States as one of the major achievements of the the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. For the Rs.3,000-crore project that would give mobile coverage to India's most backward districts and remote villages covering over 80 Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-affected districts, the DoT wants Prime Minister...