-IBN   The statement of the Union Minister of State for Health, Mullappally Ramachandran, the other day that the local bodies had failed to utilise National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) funds comes as no surprise. * The last report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the implementation NRHM in Kerala had pointed out in detail the deficiencies such as absence of a perspective plan, accumulation of huge unspent funds in banks,...

The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill is a first step towards granting functional autonomy to the country's nuclear regulator. THE true independence and functional autonomy of the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been questioned for long. The issue gained further importance in recent months after it was raised in many quarters in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March in Japan. To allay public fears as...

Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...

-The Telegraph   The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has slammed the petroleum ministry for failing to take back 25 per cent of the acreage of the KG-D6 oil and gas block off the Andhra coast from Reliance Industries after it reneged on its drilling obligations. The long-awaited report from the CAG based on a detailed performance audit of the country’s hydrocarbon production sharing contracts was tabled in Parliament today. The nation’s auditor surprisingly...

-The Times of India   What prompted the Comptroller and Auditor General from not quantifying the losses to the exchequer in the KG Basin contract and Air India decisions may never be known. But from the way the federal auditor conducted itself on the day the reports were tabled one thing was clear-- there seems to be a rethink about the posture adopted by the constitutional authority in recent months. From its almost devil-may-care...