Sudhir Chandra, chairman of the central board of direct taxes (CBDT), occupies a room in North Block whose balcony overlooks the majestic Rashtrapati Bhavan. The centrality of its location is symbolic of its significance to governance. Since time immemorial revenue collection has been crucial to sustain any form of governance. And it is the office of the CBDT chairman that devises and
The 10-day strike of Air India finally came to an end on Friday and the maharaja has limped back to normalcy but I disagree with news reports that say that the striking pilots emerged victorious in the overall drama. I see the whole issue through a different lens. The pilots may have resumed work but the question remains: what did the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA),
The world can move towards renewable energy dependence if governments across the globe followed the right policy, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report released on Monday. “Close to 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies,” said IPCC special report
Under pressure for permitting projects in violation of environment and forest laws, minister Jairam Ramesh played the victim the other day. He said: “I am completely against regularising an illegality. But sometimes I am forced to. A steel plant has been built or a power project has been constructed… violations are detected afterwards. I cannot shut them down. Hundre
Manohar the chaiwallah has been grounded, literally. His kiosk is gone. Now, he sits on the road - two steps from the spot where he used to have his kiosk in Noida’s Film City, the home to many national TV channels. He sells cigarettes, gutkha and namkeen. The 2x2 feet space on the road is too less to make tea, Maggi noodles and bread-omelette selling which used to form the major share of
The message on my phone was clear and unambiguous, almost poetic although clarity is not necessarily a must-have for poetry. “The government of India is providing every resident of India a free unique identification number – Aadhaar. Please call (and there was a telephone number here) for enrolment details in your area.” Two things struck me immediately. The use of the word &l
In the previous column, I wrote about techpedia.in, a portal of tech projects by students which brings together industry, grassroots innovators and the youth, and promotes collaborative research. If various technical universities continue to take interest as is evident now, it won’t be difficult to imagine that such a platform may have more than a million projects and ideas in a few years
Fresh after paying a penalty with afterthoughts amok, it was not long before I realised my senses` improved ability to appreciate the colour "green". It all happened in the newsroom. And who else could take a journalist to task in his own den, except the editor? My editor made me pay a Rs 100 fine for leaving my computer switched on the previous evening after I had called it a
Even as the governmnet mulls a hike a in diesel prices to tame inflation, the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) brought out by the UN has made gloomy forecasts for India`s growth in the current fiscal year. It has blamed rising oil prices for the rising inflationary pressure on the country`s economy. “The impact of high oil prices would also be evid
In getting to where it is today, Facebook has been attacked by many, from the Winklevi to its own former CFO. But, for the last one year, it has been battling Greenpeace, the environmental watchdog. The global green NGO has taken Facebook to task as the engineering powering the social networking site uses thermal power of coal-origin. In April, a record 70,000 comments hit Facebook afte
According to a World Bank study, 35 percent of e-governance projects are total failures, 50 percent are partial failure and only 15 percent have achieved success. Experts, for long, have stated that most project failures are routed in improper project development. This was the reason that the government of India and state governments engaged top consulting organizations to conceptualise e-gover
No love at first sight in Delhi University (DU) will be shown in Hindi movies from now on. The scene in which the boy meets the girl has to be reworked because DU will not be issuing pre-admission forms for undergraduate colleges from this year. So, now, scenes of the heroine perspiring under a blazing sun and is almost about to faint or is being eve-teased by a boy while standing in a
Civil society groups have voiced their scepticism even as the government readies a revised approach paper to the 12th five-year plan. Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (WNTA), Delhi-based civil society group which tracks government policies in the social sector released the civil society`s inputs for the 12th five-year plans`s approach paper. The report titled, “Approaching eq
Talk to Pakistan, we must. We are neighbours, after all. We are the bigger nation, in any case. We have our own Muslim population to take into account, as Digvijay Singh seldom lets us forget. So we must not let occasional, even frequent, acts of aggression from the other side shake our resolve to talk. We can always make a distinction, can’t we, between Pakistani
Tomorrow, on May 5, something unprecedented is happening in the UK. For the British citizens, it is their chance to vote in a referendum on the voting system used to elect MPs to the House of Commons. The question is straight and simple: "At present, the UK uses the `first past the post` system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the `alternative vote` system be used instead?"
Talk to Pakistan, we must. We are neighbours, after all. We are the bigger nation, in any case. We have our own Muslim population to take into account, as Digvijay Singh seldom lets us forget. So we must not let occasional, even frequent, acts of aggression from the other side shake our resolve to talk. We can always make a distinction, can’t we, between Pakistani army
Wu Qing, now serving her seventh term as an elected representative in a district People`s Congress in Beijing, feels that the biggest problem in Chinese model of development is Beijing`s top-down approach. In an interview with Trithesh Nandan, she said Chinese government should bring more women into the decision making process. She says that China has a long way to go when it comes to e
If one wants to learn how not to run a company, Air India makes the best case study. Government, effete bureaucracy and the spineless management at the top have missed out on no opportunity to feast on the national carrier. The rust covering all the departments of the national carrier has crippled the Maharaja. In 2009, the merger of the erstwhile Indian Airlines and Air India was
Posco got its “first” final clearance from the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) on December 29, 2009, which came attached with 28 conditions. The “second” final clearance was received on January 31, 2011, which came attached with “additional” 61 conditions. The “third” final clearance has been given today (May 2, 2011). T
A survey by the NGO Save the Children says there are 50,923 street children in Delhi one-fifth of them being girls. These children constitute 0.4 percent of city`s total population. According to the study, which is the first of it`s kind, “One out of every five (20.3 per cent) of the street children are involved in rag picking. This is followed by street vending (15.18 per cent),
