New tensions are emerging between the government and its think tank, with the food ministry making major changes to a National Advisory Council (NAC) draft of a new law slated to become the blockbuster social-security scheme of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s troubled second tenure. Key provisions of the national food security Bill, 2011, due to be introduced in Parliament’s next session starting 2 August, and estimated to cost the...
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Turning baby girls into boys? The scoop that wasn't by Priscilla Jebaraj
A sensational story in Hindustan Times about surgeons in Indore performing hundreds of sex change operations on children turns out to be false and misleading. An investigation. Last month, a Hindustan Times front page report claiming that Indore doctors were converting hundreds of baby girls into baby boys sent shock waves through the system, with everyone from the Prime Minister's Office to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights...
More »State never felt need for Rights body- by Sukhbir Siwach
CHANDIGARH: The people in Haryana have not seen State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) despite the fact that two Union home ministers, Indrajit Gupta and L K Advani, and two chairpersons of National Human Rights Commission personally took up the matter with different chief ministers of the state in the past 17 years. Initially, the state government even ignored the letters of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Then its chairperson Ranganath...
More »Environment ministry cites loopholes in forest laws to defend clearing Posco- by Nitin Sethi
NEW DELHI: The environment ministry made a specious argument before the Cuttack bench of Orissa High Court, defending its decision to clearPosco without verifying if the Forest Rights Act had been violated or not in diverting forest land to the Rs 54,000 crore integrated steel plant. It said that the law – also UPA's flagship pro-tribal scheme -- did not provide any mechanism to verify its implementation in a case,...
More »Singur Is Still The Waste Land- by Ashish K Mishra, Archisman Dinda
On the night of June 21, around 10 p.m., the police of West Bengal’s Hooghly district descended on Tata Motors’ half-built Singur plant and threw out the private guards there. In about half an hour, the new government in West Bengal, under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, took over the 997 acres that had proved to be the Waterloo of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and its allies. Earlier,...
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