South Asia Citizens Web

India’s Parliament must insist that the government should direct its Department of Atomic Energy to immediately examine and make recommendations to the government on the structure of an independent surveillance and regulatory authority for the defence nuclear facilities, says Dr A Gopalakrishnan

Confronted with the intractable problems that the messy but occasionally creative world of democracy brings with it, some civil society organisations prefer to substitute democracy with administration. Establish a Jan Lokpal, endow it with colossal power, bestow on it the status of a Leviathan, and all our problems will be solved. Sorry, this is not democratic.

Malaysian NGOs on Military Spending are concerned about the carte blanche given to the Ministry of Defence for arms purchases while health, education and other social services are still so deplorable. The total security allocation under the Tenth Malaysia Plan is RM23 billion. The arms race among the Southeast Asian countries seems the most pointless after all the talk at conferences on ASEAN integration. Even so, each country’s attempt to be ahead in the race is self-defeating. Minimising the defence budget in Malaysia and throughout ASEAN can free more valuable resources into urgently needed social services and socially useful production.

What can India learn from Japan? And what can India teach the world? How a nation copes with disaster is a sign of its democracy’s health — and whether it can move beyond mere technofixes and plumbing stereotypes

The plan of the Government of Chhattisgarh is very clear, which is to use the front of the Salwa Judum and SPOs and push these people out from their villages into either migrating out of their homelands into the Salwa Judum camps or to join the IDPs in Khammam, AP or go deeper into the forest area and join the Maoists or stay in the village and die of hunger. This tactics is not new. All this is being done in order to shrink the mass base of the Maoists.