The government has proposed to provide a new unique identification number to eight crore BPL households, or approximately 40 crore people, for its new insurance scheme, National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS). The idea of a new unique number, according to a senior health ministry official, stems from the facts that not everyone is enrolled in Aadhaar and no one should be denied services for wa
Odisha’s largest district, Mayurbhanj, is set to be free from child labour very soon. District magistrate Rajesh Prabhakar Patil, an IAS officer of 2005 batch, talked to Taru Bhatia about how the ‘Mu Bi Padhibi’ campaign has been instrumental in fighting child labour. How was the ‘Mu Bi Padhibi’ campaign initiated in your district?
“Just 22 percent of the public approves of Modi’s management of India’s volatile relationship with Pakistan. Half disapprove. This harsh judgment is relatively unchanged from 2015,” says the report authored by Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew Research Center. The report – “India and Modi: The honeymoon continues
What do the income disclosure or amnesty schemes reflect on the government? What it suggests is that the government under the normal schemes is not able to take care of tax evasion. It has tried various schemes like the voluntary disclosure scheme in the past but nothing much has been achieved. They cannot come up with voluntary disclosure schemes anymore because
Black money is essentially a popular name for black economy. By now it has ‘evolved’ into a grey, that is an indistinguishable mixture of black (i.e., illegal-immoral) and white (i.e., legitimate-moral), political economy. Also, it continues to be among the major factors holding back inclusive development of India. Evidently, such a pattern of growth in the midst of a booming grey s
Even before the searing image of Dana Majhi carrying the body of his wife could fade, another distraught family in Odisha’s Jajpur was forced to carry a woman’s body on a cart. The two back-to-back incidents highlight the fact that government schemes are failing to provide succor to the poor and the marginalised. After Dana Majhi’s plight became public, Odisha c
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has been questioned by both the opposition and the judiciary for his alleged comments which accuse the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. Mridula Mukherjee, author of RSS, School Texts and the Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: The Hindu Communal Project, provides a nuanced view on the subject. Mukherjee, also a former director
How is the response to the IDS? The response has been good. A number of declarations have come and there have been a large number of inquiries too. How many declarations have been received so far? Since the IDS data is classified we cannot reveal details. How much undisclosed income do you exp
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) has defended triple talaq and polygamy before the supreme court (SC). The argument that personal law is immune from judicial scrutiny will be considered in the court but the board has evoked a debate, within the community and outside, by supporting polygamy as a social and moral necessity and justifying triple talaq, claiming it saved lives
Ola Suleiman is a Syrian from Homs who currently works as communications officer at a non-profit called Mayday Rescue, a disaster-relief NGO in Turkey with offices in Jordan and Netherlands. Suleiman’s participation in the Syrian revolution began in April 2011 when she took part in peaceful demonstrations. She escaped the country in November 2013 since she feared arrest by the Bashar
Now that the SC has given the judgment for returning the land of the farmers in Singur, does this guarantee similar rulings for farmers protesting against acquisition of land in other parts of the country? There are no such guarantees. Different benches are gi
It was a major victory for the country’s farmers when the supreme court (SC) quashed the acquisition of land in Singur for Tata Motor Limited’s Nano car project. The judgment took a strong stand in favour of the farmers’ agricultural land besides calling into question the definition of ‘public purpose’. What is unique is that for the first time the court ordered
The union cabinet has approved the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, according to which, commercial surrogacy is completely prohibited and foreigners cannot access surrogacy in India, but altruistic surrogacy is permitted only for needy married couples with the help of close relatives as surrogate mothers. Surrogate mothers will have more rights over the child and will be offered legal support
The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, which aims to stop commercial surrogacy, was approved by the cabinet last month. However, the bill has come up with its own set of restrictions. Single parents, gays and live-in partners cannot have a surrogate child. Only couples who have been married for
Playwright, writer and director Mahesh Dattani has penned several plays such as Final Solutions, Dance Like a Man, Bravely Fought the Queen, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, Tara, and Thirty Days in September. He is the first playwright in English to receive the Sahitya Akademi award. After his first play, Where There’s a Will, Dattani, then a copywriter in an advertising firm, began to co
The union government in May partnered with UNDP India and launched Namami Gange, a massive rural sanitation and river cleaning initiative. Jaco Cilliers, country director, UNDP India, talks to Swati Chandra about the multidimensional approach of the programme that aims to
Minister of state for railways Manoj Sinha, who doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade, has also taken charge of the telecom ministry, which is conducting the largest-ever spectrum auction in the country. Sinha spoke candidly with Pankaj Kumar on the steps being taken to tackle call drops, an issue that has riled people for long, as well as reviving state-owned telecom service provi
Manas Kumar Thakur was recently elected the president of the Institute of Cost Accountants of India (ICAI) – the apex body for cost accountants with around 5 lakh students and 69,000 members – for 2016-17. Thakur talks with Governance Now on the role of cost accountants in the economy. How can cost accountants contribute to
Elections for Brihanmumbai municipal corporation, the country’s richest civic body, will be held in February. Sanjay Raut, leader of the ruling Shiv Sena party and executive editor of the party mouthpiece Saamna, spoke to Geetanjali Minhas on preparations for the polls and other issues. Excerpts: What are your plans and prepa
The government aims to profit from the longest river of the country by using it as a water highway. It has expressed interest in dredging lengthy stretches of the Ganga, building barrages and thus introducing a ‘cheaper mode of transportation’. This means that the exploitation of the Ganga will not be restricted to its headwaters in Uttarakhand where the river has been chained up in
