Boom time for IPS

The Indian Police Service (IPS) officers have long vied for parity with their Indian Administrative Service (IAS) counterparts and the inter-service rivalry is one of the long-running battles in Indian babudom. However, the police babus may find they have less to complain about against their rival service in the present Manmohan Singh dispensation. According to babu-watchers, the United Progressive Alliance government has been particularly partial to IPS officers of the ret .....

No babus for Nilekani

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) may have got underway with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointing former Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani to head the ambitious project, but my favourite tribesmen apparently are less than enthused about it. According to sources, Mr Nilekani who had said he preferred to have Indian Administrative Service officers in positions of responsibility instead of denizens from the corporate world, as was widely expected from a .....

Blow hot, blow cold!

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram is itching to implement the new internal security architecture that he’s worked out. But he has plenty to worry about on a shared resolve to fight the Naxal menace as there is a nascent challenge to his plans developing in Jharkhand. All signs emanating from the state seem to suggest that newly elected chief minister Shibu Soren has already gone soft on Maoists. What is causing anxiety in Dilli is that Jharkhand is in the heart of Naxal .....

Best laid plans…

After raising hopes, and much heat and dust, about hiring professional talent from outside the government sector, the government seems to be giving this particular idea a quiet burial. For when push comes to shove, especially while hiring heads of public sector undertakings or the regulatory institutions, the government has fallen back on the ubiquitous babu or ex-babu, as seen in some instances.

Considering that the idea was vigorously flourished when the Competition Co .....

Security and speculation

Speculation on the major move of the all-powerful National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan to a gubernatorial position refuses to die down. This has been a subject of discussion several times before. Mr Narayanan has been a powerful aide of the Prime Minister and there are some who worry that this move may enfeeble the well-balanced structure of the highest office in the land. Is the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) the victim, they ask.

But reports of sniper attacks .....

Clean-up time

Mumbaikars, you’d better not sweep this under the carpet or raise a holy stink! It’s time to come clean. The recently launched nationwide campaign on urban sanitation will place 441 class-I cities under the scanner of sanitary inspectors. They will be judged on the basis of their sanitation standards.

We Dilliwalas have a head start over the rest of the nation, since we hosting the Commonwealth Games next year. It wouldn’t do to assail the sensitive nervous systems of the ex .....

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

Tigers going extinct, is and ought to be our major national concern. And a visit to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan restores one’s realization that conserving nature and preserving our nature needs to be the highest priority for many reasons.

Sighting a tiger in the wild, is a magnificent sight that you cannot forget. The Jaisal and Anjali Singh owned Sher Bagh with its luxurious tented accommodation and some of the most experienced forest drivers is cle .....

Even as Dilli and the rest of the country mulls over a recent World Bank report that many Indian cities will run dry by 2020, Mumbaikars already have got a whiff of what’s in store. The decision of the Maharashtra government of not providing water to new high rise buildings in Mumbai until 2012 puts a dampener on many real estate developers’ plans but Dilli hasn’t yet opted to go this way. According to the World Bank study, among Asian cities, Dilli and Chennai have the worst record in terms of .....