'As Jharkhand votes – in five phases from 30 November to December 20 and results on December 23 – to elect a new government, some of the state’s poorest citizens cannot access food grains due to a drive between 2014 and 2018 to weed out fake beneficiaries from the PDS. The solution has entailed a dependence on technology that shuts out beneficiaries, sometimes illegally... Of the state’s 33 million people, 71% or 23.3 million, are directly dependent on the PDS system. In the past five years, the PDS system has often failed the state’s most vulnerable.
'Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar has made a bizarre statement that pollution is not linked to the shortening of life in India. "No Indian study has shown pollution shortens life. Let us not create fear psychosis among people," Union minister Prakash Javadekar told Parliament on Friday... The minister's statement is in sharp contrast with several studies, where the Government of India is also a party. These studies have found that a rise in pollution is linked to deaths and shorter life spans.
'In the early hours of Saturday, when the people of Maharashtra were fast asleep, the country awoke to strife and unfreedom. News of the death of democracy – the tearing up of constitutional norms – was broken by the executioner-in-chief, Narendra Modi, through his preferred medium, Twitter. Curiously, the morning newspapers had all led with the headline that the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray was going to be Maharashtra chief minister.
'Though the Ministry of Finance had thought about sharing details of the electoral bond scheme with political parties and seeking the public’s comments on it, the idea was dropped after a presentation before the prime minister on August 21, 2017... RTI activist Bharadwaj says it is apparent that during the meeting with the prime minister, the decision to not consult political parties and not circulate the draft scheme to all national and state parties with a 15-day window to seek their comments was taken.
'The controversy over electoral bonds has resurfaced, this time after a five-part investigative series by Nitin Sethi that was published in HuffPost India. The series alleged that the government lied, bent rules and repeatedly ignored objections raised by various stakeholders. To demand answers, the Congress protested at the Parliament’s Gandhi Statue on Friday/ The party’s MP’s have been demanding that the ruling BJP government — especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi — break the silence over the issue...
'Terror-accused MP Pragya Singh Thakur has been nominated to the Parliamentary Consultative Committee of the Ministry of Defence. According to reports, the Bhopal MP will be part of the 21-member consultative committee, which is headed by defence minister Rajnath Singh. Singh is an accused in the Malegaon blasts case. She was fielded by the BJP against Congress leader Digvijaya Singh in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, calling her nomination a “satyagraha” against “false terror cases”...'
'The Prime Minister’s Office under Narendra Modi reportedly ordered for rules about electoral bonds – which the Centre itself had notified just two months earlier – to be broken in March 2018, ahead of assembly elections in six states. The broken rules, Nitin Sethi reports for HuffPost India, were first called an ‘exception’ but quickly turned into the norm. The report is based on government documents obtained under the Right to Information Act by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired)...
'Till October 2019, over 2.5 crore applicant households were turned back when they sought work under the rural job guarantee scheme... It would have seemed natural – indeed, imperative – that, as India grapples with a deadly slowdown, with agricultural economy growing only at around 2% and rural joblessness hovering at a shocking 8%, the government would infuse some energy in the implementation of the rural jobs guarantee scheme (MGNREGA).
'The Indian government wrote to 11 public sector undertakings asking them to verify their records to check if Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa had exercised “undue influence” during his tenure as special secretary in the Ministry of Power between 2009 and 2013, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday... Lavasa made headlines in May when he disagreed with the Election Commission’s decisions with regard to violations of the Model Code of Conduct during the Lok Sabha elections.
'On Sunday, the intense toxic haze building up in North India over the past week reached apocalyptic levels. Ten monitoring stations in the National Capital Region recorded pollution levels in the “severe plus emergency” category... Despite living in Delhi, however, top ministers in the Prime Minister Narenda Modi government seemed to be on another planet. Environment minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted in the morning to ask Indians to start their day with music...
