Recently an interesting article appeared in The New York Times on how after the completion of a social audit at Nagarkurnool in Andhra Pradesh, villagers punished a local official for swindling funds allocated to the central government's flagship project, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. The irate villagers tied the official's hands and paraded him around the neighbouring villages. This is not a one-off incident; similar accounts have...
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‘Undo injustice to visually impaired persons denied IAS'
They have not been inducted despite clearing civil services exam.Seeking to draw the attention of the government to the case of two visually impaired persons, Ajit Kumar and Ashish Singh Thakur, who have not been inducted into the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) even after clearing the civil services examination, Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP Brinda Karat sought the intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.Urges sympathyIn her letter to Dr....
More »Delhi institute mistaken for Pakistan intelligence agency by Supriya Sharma
Chhattisgarh special prosecutor TC Pandya on Friday claimed that civil rights activist Dr Binayak Sen's wife Ilina was in correspondence with the ISI — a huge gaffe. For, the ISI she had links with was the Indian Social Institute, not the Pakistani intelligence agency. Pandya was deposing in a local sessions court and said that Sen had dealings not just with local Maoist networks but also international terrorist groups as well. He...
More »CPI(M): why this “veil of secrecy” over FTA with EU
‘Government does not have mandate to conduct parleys without discussion'Several areas of concerns in texts being negotiated for the India-EU FTAThe Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Saturday expressed concern over the “veil of secrecy” around negotiations for the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and re-emphasised that the Manmohan Singh government did not have the mandate to conduct parleys on it without discussion within the country.Referring to the EU...
More »India ninth-most corrupt country: Survey
About 54% Indians paid a bribe in the past year, according to a global survey by Transparency International (TI), which pegs the extent of corruption in India at levels comparable with Cambodia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Senegal, Uganda and Liberia. TI’s Global Corruption Barometer survey, released on global anti-corruption day, measures public perception on corruption across the world. One metric asks respondents if they had paid a bribe during the past 12 months...
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