The Telegraph reports US welcoming India from the cold!. The article states:

"America is preparing formally to recognise India as a fully-fledged nuclear power this week as the world's most powerful and the world's most populous democracies hail a new era of joint co-operation."

The article talks about US giving India a special status and access to nuclear technology denied to other countries that have not signed the NPT.

Five IIT geeks have come together to form a political party - called 'Paritrana'

The core team of "Paritrana" comprises Rajpurohit , Shukla, Amit Beesen, also the vice president and a B Tech (Mechanical) from IIT Bombay and a LLB graduate, Chandrashekhar (national treasurer), B Tech (computer science) from IIT Kanpur, Bharat Sundaram, the PRO of the party and B Tech from IIT Kanpur and PhD in electronics from Melbourne.

"Paritrana means complete relief from the various causes of distress, and that is what we want to do for our people", added Chandrashekhar. Low funds have not discouraged them in their efforts of holding door-to-door campaigns in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and parts of Maharashtra

Way to go geeks.

We recently covered the scheme by the Congress to divide social sector funding in proportion to the minorites population.

IndianExpress is running another editorial which which helps clear the political motives, and the social repurcussions behind the scheme..

The UPA’s proposal also highlights — through its extreme measure — the gradual erosion of the equality of opportunity by recourse to identity politics. That equality guaranteed in the Constitution is meant to be enhanced through affirmative action and safeguards for the rights of minorities. Instead, by lazily opting for easy measures like reservations in ever more sectors and institutions, successive governments have been transforming affirmative measures into proportional representation.

Read the entire article here.

The UPA Government is ready to announce social welfare programmes which earmarks a percentage of the funds for minorities based upon their relative population.

Not only this, the plan, prepared by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, says that the schemes and funds shall be "further split state-wise for each minority community in the ratio of the populations of the minority community in each state."

The Supreme court has earlier disapproved of such a scheme arguing that: "Encouragement to such fissiparous tendencies would be a serious jolt to the secular structure of constitutional democracy...We should guard against making our country akin to a theocratic state based on multi-nationalism. Our concept of secularism is that ‘state’ shall have no religion"

IndianExpress reports.

Continuing in its campaign of populist, pseudo-development and so-called reforms-with-a-human-face measures, the Congress it seems is bent upon imposing quota's in the private sectors.

Flashing the law ministry’s stand that the Centre can extend job quotas to the private sector even without amending the Constitution, the ministry of social justice has started pushing reluctant corporates to act on their own to ward off state intervention.

The point is learnt to have been conveyed by social justice minister Meira Kumar to Infosys chief NR Narayana Murthy and Thermax boss Anu Agha.

IndiaTimes reports.

Shekhar Gupta delivers a scathing rebuke to the political class criticizing the act of issuing ordinance's to bypass the law for gaining political advantage and at times legalizing their own crimes.

The immediate provocation for this is the truly shocking decision by the Congress high command to set up a party panel to look into the prospects of issuing an ordinance amending the law whereby all — or at least most of the building violations and land-grab cases in the capital will be “legalized.”

He writes further:

The recourse to amending the law or writing fresh legislation is a tempting escape for politicians from constitutional checks and balances. It becomes even more tempting when there is political consensus, howsoever cynical, to do so.

Read the entire article here.

IndianExpress is running an editorial on how Goa has become the latest victim of the moral policing going around the country:

This is becoming too much the way with the Congress’s state governments. From Bombay to Bangalore, its leaderships have been stifling local cultures....It’s a convenient way to harness the strains of orthodoxy that lie dormant in most communities for immediate political gain. It also, very significantly, acquits the administration of the democratic responsibility of allowing individuals the right to conduct business or just have fun while enforcing a just law.

Read the whole article here.

Narayana Murthy blasts out on the corruption and the current largely corrupt breed of politicians and what that means for India.

"Our institutions--from our Parliament and legislatures to our courts and distribution systems--have become pervaded with corruption"

"There is a strong incentive for our politicians to maintain the current status quo--where the government is not accountable to the public on the most basic issues--by keeping people ignorant and illiterate"

"India has the highest percentage of reservation in the world--it is the only country where merit has been relegated to second place"

ExpressIndia reports on the complete tirade.