-Express News Service   Having waited almost a year for the government to initiate the process of carrying out electoral reforms, Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi has decided to write to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tomorrow to seek his intervention. “I am writing to the Prime Minister tomorrow reminding him of this long-pending thing (electoral reforms). There is a national consultation on the subject which is also pending,” Quraishi said today during the...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

Unless data gathering for the Socio Economic and Caste Census is refined, the exercise could cast out the real claimants. Have the census enumerators recently knocked on your door with swanky tablet computers in hand? If they have, it's because they have begun to go door-to-door in most States to complete the final phase of the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC). This mammoth exercise is being coordinated by more than...

-The Business Standard   Too much grain, and no way to distribute it In about a month from now, the country’s ever-bulging foodgrain stockpile will bloat further to over 75 million tonnes, a record amount. This will be nearly two-and-a-half times the stipulated maximum food buffer. Worse, it will outstrip the available warehousing capacity (covered and open) of 63 million tonnes by a wide margin. Even today, a good part of the present...

-PTI   The Cabinet on Wednesday approved a Bill that seeks to regulate government purchases of above Rs 50 lakh through a transparent bidding process. The Cabinet meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, approved the public procurement Bill that has a provision to debar bidders found engaged in corrupt practices, sources said. Currently, there is no overarching legislation governing public procurement by the central government and central public sector enterprises. The General Financial Rules,...