The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday approved the Competition (Amendment) Bill 2009 which was passed by the Lok Sabha. The Bill repeals and replaces the Competition (Amendment) Ordinance, 2009. The Bill provides for transfer of anti-competition cases pending before the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) to an appellate tribunal. With this, the commission would cease to exist, two years ahead of its scheduled closure. Tabling the Bill, Minister of State for...

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday registered a disproportionate assets case against a senior IAS officer, presently posted in the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) as Commissioner, after raiding his residence and other places allegedly owned by him in the capital region. The investigating agency also claimed to have recovered huge assets disproportionate to his known source of income. The officer, Manoj Kumar Agarwal, 43, is posted as Commissioner...

The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed by voice vote the contentious Essential Commodities (Amendment and Validation) Bill, 2009, (sugarcane pricing Bill) after the Central Government assured the House that State governments would not be required to pay the difference of the Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) for sugarcane set by the Centre and the State Advised Price fixed by the States. On persistent requests by opposition members led by Venkiah...

The Rajya Sabha on Thursday approved re-naming the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGREGA), but not before the Government was criticised for corruption in the implementation of the scheme launched in 2005. Responding to clarifications, Union Minister for Rural Development C.P. Joshi announced that there would be a “different wage index” under the scheme, one that may not necessarily be...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...