-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved proposed amendments in the Prevention of Corruption Act, providing a safeguard to retired government officials from unnecessary prosecution for any bona-fide MIStake and also broadening the definition of bribery to make a commercial entity liable for failing to prevent bribery of an official. The proposed changes - Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Bill, 2013 - also provide for allowing confiscation of...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Panchayats under the shadow of the ‘khaps’- Sahil Makkar
-Live Mint Despite being declared unconstitutional by SC, ‘khaps' continue to hold sway in parallel with the state machinery Rohtak/Bhiwani: Ravinder Gehlawat and his wife Shilpa had been married for less than four months when they were marched out of their village-Dharana in Jhajjar district of Haryana-by men of the local community and warned never to return. Their fate was sealed on 24 April 2009 when the local khap panchayat, which translates...
More »Dalit empowerment still a distant dream- Elizabeth Roche and Arundhati Ramanathan
-Live Mint Almost two decades after the Panchayati Raj Act was notified, a key aim of the legislation remains unfulfilled Papapatti/Madurai district: S. Muruganadam, 38, is the Dalit president of the Papapatti village panchayat in Madurai district and a post-graduate in political science. His term ends in 2016 and he has made up his mind not to run for re-election. "I think a panchayat president's post is an important post because only...
More »Over 2,000 fewer farmers every day-P Sainath
-The Hindu The MIStaken notion that the 53 per cent of India's population ‘dependent on agriculture' are all ‘farmers' leads many to disMISs the massive farmers' suicides as trivial There are nearly 15 million farmers (‘Main' cultivators) fewer than there were in 1991. Over 7.7 million less since 2001, as the latest Census data show. On average, that's about 2,035 farmers losing ‘Main Cultivator' status every single day for the last 20...
More »An ecosystem to save, or squander-Madhav Gadgil and Ligia Noronha
-The Hindu Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel's report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group This is a challenging time in India's development history where a number of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking,...
More »