-Live Mint In the two years to March 2012, the number of kisan credit cards grew by 28%, while the outstanding amount grew by 76% So far, the rural job-guarantee scheme, other social programmes by state governments and the raising of minimum support prices to farmers have been cited as reasons for the continued buoyancy in rural consumption and also for inflation in food items. But there could be another insidious...
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No meeting ground -TK Rajalakshmi
-Frontline The Land Acquisition Bill runs into a roadblock as political parties fail to reach an agreement on the substantive features of the draft Bill or on the amendments proposed. The efforts of the United Progressive Alliance government to broker a consensus on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012, which has been pending for over a year, have not paid off not because...
More »Naxalites set up own military school in Dandakaranya -Bharti Jain
-The Times of India The CPI (Maoist) has formed its own elite training 'institute' in the Dandakaranya forests, a Naxalite bastion, to transform tribal cadres into Communist professionals equipped to handle tasks related to the Central Committee, the outfit's apex decision-making body. The Buniyadi Communist Training School (BCTS), a brainchild of CPI (Maoist) top gun Ganapathy, has been churning out professionally-trained Communists since 2009 with basic military skills and knowledge of Hindi,...
More »Most big patented drugs skip India -Rupali Mukherjee
-The Times of India Big pharma may be crying hoarse over India's "weak'' intellectual property environment, but over the past five years or so, they have introduced only a handful of their patented blockbusters in the country. That's not all. The contribution of patented drugs in the Rs 72,000-crore pharma retail market is not even 1%, indicating that multinationals have been traditionally slow and have a poor track record in introducing...
More »What Right To Education? Failing to meet the prescribed norms, half of the existing schools will lose their recognition -Arvind Panagariya
-The Times of India The three-year compliance period for the Right to Education (RTE) Act is just over. What has the Act accomplished? Sadly, not very much that is positive. A key provision in the law abolishes board examinations and grants automatic promotion to each child to the next grade at the end of the academic year. It also requires the award of a diploma to all at the end of eight...
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