India launches on Thursday the task of counting its teeming billion-plus population, with 2.5 million people set to fan out over the country to begin work for the 2011 census. The exercise has formidable challenges -- coverage of a vast geographical area, left-wing rebels and separatists, widespread illiteracy, and people with a bewildering diversity of cultures, languages and customs. "The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Powerlessness in actual lives is the hurdle justice must clear by Amartya Sen
The state must ensure that individual freedoms not only exist, but that everyone has the ability to experience them The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed...
More »Estate workers, potters may get rice at Rs.2 a kg
Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac told the Assembly on Wednesday that inclusion of estate workers, the Disabled and potters in the scheme for supply of rice at Rs.2 a kg would be considered. Replying to the general discussion on the budget, the Minister said that their inclusion would be subject to condition that the total number of families benefiting from the scheme should not exceed 35 lakh. The budget could not...
More »Ministers’ panel proposes limits for National Food Security Bill by Liz Mathew and Ruhi Tewari
An empowered group of ministers (eGoM) has urged the government to delink the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA) from nutritional security and keep the issue price of wheat and rice flexible under the Act. But a top official of the agriculture ministry said some members of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government want NFSA to be an “umbrella legislation” addressing social security concerns. “The finance ministry is of the view that...
More »Draft food security bill may irk Sonia, states, SC by Nitin Sethi
The government has readied the draft of its promised Food Security Act but the bare provisions appear to fall short of the pledge on many counts. It could not only trigger a face-off with the states but also cause heartburn to the Supreme Court and displease Congress chief Sonia Gandhi who had prepared a draft and sent it to the Prime Minister's Office last June. The Bill is a result...
More »