-The Business Standard A panel headed by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia has advocated the use of unique identification numbers to plug loopholes in the public distribution system (PDS). The working group on PDS reforms, which finalised its draft report today, has also suggested a nationwide computerised system for tracking transportation and distribution of PDS items. “We have approved the draft report and will give it to the Prime Minister...

In Uttar Pradesh's most impoverished region, Bundelkhand, government officials feed off not just the living but also the dead. Headlines Today has exposed how corrupt officials exploit the grieving families of farmers, who have committed suicide.   In a visit to Bundelkhand in 2008, AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi repeated a phrase borrowed from his father Rajiv Gandhi: "Out of 100 paise, only 15 paise reaches the poor".   While travelling through this dustbowl...

The audited balance sheets of the six largest political parties in India are hard to get and harder to decipher: they hide more than they reveal but are nonetheless worth close examination. Between them, the Congress, BJP, BSP, SP, NCP and CPM reported total income of Rs 1,046.76 crore for the year ending March 31, 2009. That was the year in which most of the funds for the 2009 Lok...

There will soon be a new set of glass doors at Krishi Bhavan. The newly elevated Cabinet Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh plans to bring the doors — a signature element of his interior décor right from his early days at the Commerce Ministry — to his new office. Over the last two tumultuous years at the Environment Ministry, those doors have symbolised the transparency and accessibility he claims...

Can the promise of a car or a mixer grinder help keep India's population in check? Well, that's what health authorities in the northern state of Rajasthan apparently believe. They are offering a cheap car, among other things, as a prize in an attempt to sign up some 20,000 people to meet an ambitious sterilisation target. Time will tell whether this turns out to be another gimmick or an innovative incentive. But...