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The Nepali Congress, leading constituent or the ruling combine in Nepal, re-asserted its commitment to promulgate a new constitution and perhaps the most profoundly democratic constitution in the SAARC region, by the set deadline, 22 January next year. The Prime Minister and NC leader Sushil Koirala, affirmed this at a joint meeting of the party´s parliamentary party and central working committee on Sunday at his official residence in Baluwatar. The NC already submitted its views on the proposed statute. There is a broad consensus about it among NC, Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), Rastriya Prajatantra Party and Bahujan Shakti Party.

For the last one week advocates of Delhi District Courts are on strike. They are agitating for the passage of Delhi High Court (Amendment) Act from Parliament in its winter session itself. They are going to demonstrate at the Parliament House and they are threatening to disrupt the traffic movements of Delhi if the Bill is not passed immediately.

Political analysts say Jharkhand is next experiment lab of Narendra Modi-Amit Shah team. The election process in the 14-year-old state is in progress; three rounds of polling have already been completed. All indications are that Jharkhand too may go the way of Haryana and Maharashtra where the BJP has formed governments. Riding on the crest of Modi wave, the BJP is heading for a majority in Jharkhand. According to pollsters, the BJP may get round 50 of 81 seats. But the problem before the BJP leadership is not whether the party will get a majority or not but to pick up a Chief Minister; the party has not projected one in the elections.

The Indian Union has a division of power between entities called Centre and states in a way that the People’s Republic of Bangladesh doesn’t. The constitution of the Union of India is a product of interests of the Centre, given that only the Central parliament and not the state assemblies can change it.

BHOPAL: Dalits and Tribals in Madhya Pradesh particularly, Dalits face discrimination in almost every walk of life. According to an exhaustive study done by a rights group Dalit children across rural Madhya Pradesh face some 70 kinds of grim abuses. The study which was supported by the Action Aid reveals that Dalit children in schools are forced to eat mid-day meals in marked out plates and asked to sit in the back rows of their classrooms. The Dalit schoolchildren across rural Madhya Pradesh face some 70 kinds of grim abuses, a new study backed by rights group Action Aid has revealed.

The steady decline in oil prices in the latter half of 2014 - by more than 40 per cent by December 10 to a five-year low of around 63 dollars a barrel - has become an unexpected bonanza for import-dependent countries like India but also carries with it some significant downside risks for the global economy as a whole.

The Modi government’s decision to do away with the six decade old Planning Commission is an important exercise in a federal setup meeting the assertion of the chief ministers. Modi had announced this from the ramparts of Red Fort during his first Independence Day speech. This week it has been taken forward with a meeting of chief ministers to discuss and decide about the shape of the new body. As expected, politics has crept into this important issue and the efforts to sort out the differences in the retreat informally did not work. While the NDA chief ministers endorsed Modi’s view the UPA chief ministers, mostly from the Congress ruled states opposed the idea that it was being done with a view to get rid of the Nehruvian legacy.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Is the legal tide turning against Finance Minister and Kerala Congress(M) president, K. M. Mani in the bar bribery allegation case? The question may seem A BIT far-fetched at the moment. But a few straws in the wind are too significant to be dismissed as being of no consequence.

Most of the large oil-importing consuming countries including India and Indonesia, which bear the additional social burden of ever-escalating fuel subsidies to insulate their poor people from global oil price gyrations, heaved an immense sigh of relief when the 12-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) did not cut output to shore up its sliding crude prices in its meeting on November 27. The Vienna-based world’s premier commodity cartel since the mid-1960s has been agonizing over the declining crude prices from a level of $114 per barrel in June to around $65 per barrel now.

Does a government’s size really matter when it comes to delivering good governance? In business, a slim management and small workforce are generally linked with higher efficiency though the desirable manager-worker ratio varies from industry to industry. Contrary to general perception, India has one of the slimmest governments in terms of the bureaucracy-public ratio. It also has one of the laziest, underperforming and ineffective bureaucracies in the world. Except the population and the number of political parties, all else are in big short supply.