The National Green Tribunal (NGT) came into existence a year ago, but did not become functional till recently due to challenges to the NGT Act, 2010. The tribunal was set up to enable affected parties to appeal against any infringement of environmental laws and to entertain cases of civil liability pertaining to environmental laws in India. The predecessor to the NGT, the erstwhile Nation
This is a report that puts the country to shame. `Trillion dollar economy: opportunities and challenges for banks`, brought out by Ernst and Young and Assocham claims that India has the second highest number of households in the world which are left out of the formal finance sector. “There are 600,000 unbanked villages in India and only 38 percent of the country’s bank branc
The paranoia about cut-offs, though understandable, is also comic. It is simplistic to see the ‘cut-off jolt’ as a bolt from the blue. It has been in the offing for quite some time. We had enough time to initiate preventive measures. We did nothing. This may sound surprising but is true, nonetheless, that conducting admissions is not any less traumatic than securing them. Ye
The government has made a strong case that only the elected representatives have a right to frame laws. A spokesman of the Congress party has even labelled a section of civil society "unelected tyrant". But the government`s own devices of inviting public participation leave much to be desired. The Department of Information (DIT) under Kapil Sibal recently invited feedback on t
My dear wife stops reading my column the moment I refer to St Stephen’s, my alma mater. So, let me try begining with Hindu College, the perfectly eminent institution across the road. Kavita A Sharma applied to Hindu College straight into second year. She wanted an exit from medicine and the then principal agreed to admit her. The initial results weren’t very encouragi
Swami Nigamanand is dead. The 36-year-old swami died in Haridwar after fasting for 114 days to protest illegal mining along the Ganga. Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said in New Delhi a day later that the matter was the Uttarakhand government’s responsibility. The BJP-ruled state government will surely pass off something equally unpalatable for an explanation or blame the centre
Outsourcing is as old as – wait, let me get my researcher to check that out for you. Ancient civilisations didn’t think twice before getting neighbouring civilisations to build irrigation canals, for instance, in return for sharing the benefits of farming. If you think about it, getting somebody else to do your work cannot be a modern concept. The caveman who hired a smarter caveman
Can there be anything more telling about the insensitivity and brutality of a democratically elected government which sends cops to surround villages where young children and women are lying on the ground for days together to resist forcible eviction from their land by declaring their protest “unlawful”? Photographs of people’s protest from Jagatsinghpur in Orissa, wh
Gandhi’s oft-quoted talisman says: whenever in doubt, consider the case of the poorest person. The question is: how? India is a welfare state, it spends two percent of its GDP to fight poverty – a higher percentage than any other country in Asia and about three times China’s figure, according to a recent World Bank review, and yet the poor have become only poorer and their number has possibl
The Posco story is getting more pathetic day by day. There are the agitators – Dhinkia being the epicenter – who want to intensify the stir against forcible land acquisition. Though the district administration has suspended the land acquisition for five days – till June 17 – for a local agrarian festival, the anti-Posco activists including women and children contin
India’s growing information technology (IT) infrastructure faces security threats in the form of virus attacks, forced crashing of systems and hacking. Last year, for example, the Stuxnet worm is known to have attacked utility companies in India, among other countries. Besides that, the computer systems of the ministry of external affairs and a few defence establishments also came under a
In recent weeks, one Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) every week (the last being with Mozambique), has been our average. However, our handling of the Vodafone tax case has left much to be desired. The government of India has been entering into DTAAs with various countries to provide for reduced rates of tax on dividend, interest, royalties, technical service fees etc received
In recent years the increasing influence of the media has changed the shape of politics all over the globe. Consequently, it has raised provocative questions about journalism’s role in the political process. There are questions about media’s effect on the political system and the subsystems – the legislature, the executive and the lobbies. Is media power in politics a
Amid heated debate over bringing back unaccounted money stashed abroad, a child rights group has claimed that child labour generates Rs 1.2 lakh crore of black money in the country every year. According to a report `Capital Corruption: Child Labour in India` by Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), the figure was arrived at by calculating the number of child labourers, income earned by t
The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 hosted by the National Advisory Council (NAC) on its website for public scrutiny, apparently rewrites some key principles of the Constitution of India, Indian Penal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 and Indian public services. It is the downside of allowing social activism to overshadow the
Anna Hazare`s protest for the Jan Lokpal Bill has an unlikely twin - the Tea Party movement in the US. And we are not talking of how both embody citizens` voices against the government. The conditions of their births vary greatly - Tea Party started in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis while Hazare`s protest started in 2011, when the UPA government ignored the Lokpal Bill,
No self-respecting democracy or government would have allowed her greatest painter to die in exile. India did. Our leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have promptly described his demise as a "national loss". That’s a crazy and hypocritical thing to say after you did nothing to assure a man his fundamental right to life and personal liberty. I hope t
No self-respecting democracy or government would have allowed her greatest painter to die in exile. India did. Our leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have promptly described his demise as a "national loss". That’s a crazy and hypocritical thing to say after you did nothing to assure a man his fundamental right to life and personal liberty. I hope t
Could India have saved the embarrassment before the international community because of the so-called oversight in the list of 50 most wanted fugitives residing in Pakistan? The list of most wanted terrorists was handed to Pakistan government in May this year. However, it later emerged that two alleged fugitives out of the list were in India. One of the listed terrorists, Wazhul Kumar Kh
Phula, Shyama, Madhu, Rani ki mummy, Chintu ki mummy and other women of Motilal camp, a sprawling slum near Munirka were all there. Having wrapped up their daily chores which included sending their kids off to school, and cooking breakfast for their husbands, they had gathered at a community centre run by Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), an NGO working in the field of right to informatio
