-The Times of India   Union minister of state for planning, science and technology and earth sciences Ashwini Kumar on Saturday expressed his dissatisfaction over the poor implementation of MGNREGA projects in Jharkhand alleging less than half of the households were provided with job cards. Kumar, on a two-day visit to the state, dwelt most part of his interaction with the media here trying to convince people about the "irrelevance" of the social...

  There are times when fathers and sons say the same things. In 2008, days after terrorists from Pakistan massacred scores of people in Mumbai, a group of affluent young couples met for dinner. They work in large corporations, hold university degrees from the United States and England, subscribe to The Economist and even read it. But it was inevitable that when the men started talking about how the Indian government was too...

After a four-decade battle, Indian lawmakers took the first formal step toward creating an independent anticorruption agency on Thursday, introducing a bill in Parliament that would appoint a powerful ombudsman, or Lokpal, to investigate wrongdoing by government officials. But the draft of the law, which exempts the prime minister, members of Parliament and many other officials from the Lokpal’s jurisdiction, was roundly rejected by many of the people who had...

The Union Government has announced that it would bring the Lokpal Bill in the monsoon session of Parliament which is expected to pass it in the winter session. The all-party meeting held on the Lokpal issue damned the civil society and passed a one-line resolution: “The all-party meeting agreed that the government should bring before the next session of Parliament a strong and effective Lokpal Bill following established procedures.” The...

After the brutal murder of Azad, is there any hope for well-meaning routine calls for “dialogue” and “peace talks”? What can the "civil society" do as a serious, real intervention? It is reported that the decades-old talks with Naga insurgent groups has made some progress recently (See “Differences ‘narrowed’,” Times of India, July 19, 2011). One reason why talks have a chance in these cases is that separatism comes in...