Union finance minister P Chidambaram presented the Interim Budget for 2014-15 on February 17, 2014. Here are some of the highlights: The planned expenditure will remain unchanged at Rs. 5,55,322 crore. Fiscal and Revenue deficits a
Health secretary Keshav Desiraju was removed – in effect ‘transferred’ to the consumer affairs ministry – for not supporting Ketan Desai, the tainted former president of the medical council of India (MCI), as a crucial hand
Those who are old enough to jog their memories of the 1980s would easily recall that the anti-industry political climate of those times was an outcome of VP Singh’s rebellion against prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. During his stint as finance m
So many thoughts come to mind after watching the hilarious, dramatic, erratic, and completely nonsense exit of the Arvind Kejriwal government on Friday. Blackmailing. Naiveté of those who want to overhaul everything in a day. Systemic break
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been part of the business activity of the public corporate sector, it is the private sector that now has to play its role in this area, says Vandana Chanana, general manager CSR, GAIL (India) Ltd.
[This article appeared in the Feb 16, 2014 edition of Governance Now. It was written before Arvind Kejriwal resigned as Delhi chief minister.] The pro-transparency cum anti-corruption movement reinvented as political party, Aam Aa
While the 49 day old Kejriwal Delhi government came to a dramatic end as the Jan Lokpal bill proposal was defeated in the assembly by the Congress and the BJP, Odisha became the first state in country to enact a law for the creation of a Lokayukta
It took Alice in Wonderland longer to slide down the slippery slope than it did the aam aadmi saviour to come a cropper in his own homemade version of Blunderland. The iconic sweater unravelled into a grimy knotted ball of wool. A series o
A few days before the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) was held in the first week of February, a lesser-known three-day international festival, Sheharnama, was held in the city from January 30 to February 1. As part of the festival
Without settling the claims made under Forest Rights Act (FRA) and the 36 preconditions prescribed by the group of ministers, the government is learned to have granted stage-II forest clearance to the Mahan coal block, located at Singrauli in Madh
While Nehru Place has maintained its place under the sun, three more markets have made it to the US’ 2013 list of out-of-cycle notorious markets review. The review report, published this week, lists out online and physical markets across the
When Sushma Swaraj, the leader of opposition in Lok Sabha, said on Thursday (February 13) that the Congress is “solely responsible for what has happened in the house", she could have been nearer the truth than most of her party leaders
I do not personally know Sudhir Krishna, secretary of urban development department but I have interacted with him enough to say with conviction that his English does not merit reproach. The first time I met him in September last yea
Even as citizens feel the unique identification number or the Aadhaar programme has added just another layer to the existing identification process and criteria for accessing services, a leading economist, who earlier headed the planning commissio
A quick look at the urban affairs secretary’s cv (read it here) will tell you that Dr Sudhir Krishna would know English just as well as any top civil servant in
In his 33 years in Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), Mukesh D Ambani, India’s richest man and head of one the country’s biggest corporate entities, has earned numerous accolades. Several such paeans are listed on Reliance’s website
By now it’s too familiar a story to be surprising: a writer writes a book (often with years of slogging and painstaking research); someone—an individual, but often an individual claiming to represent a certain community—finds som
Emphasising the importance of women empowerment, U D Choubey, director general of SCOPE urged the public sector women employees to take concrete steps under their CSR programmes for developing skills and overall employment generation for women in
I have been taught over the years that the word ‘recall’ is linked to memory. But I first encountered a different meaning of the word in 1997 when I was informed that my first Maruti 800 car, bought a year earlier, was being recalled t
Admitting that financial inclusion is a tall order for the country, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan, however, did not commit on implementation of Nachiket Mor committee. Last month, the committee gave slew of measures on boosti
