A rap on the knuckles from the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) for its failure to eradicate the shameful practice of manual scavenging in the country has prompted the government to consider amendments to the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrine (Prohibition) Act, 1993 and see how the existing scheme for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers can be recast.

In a bid to address Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s concern on “unacceptably high” levels of malnutrition in India, a meeting has been called at the PMO on Tuesday to examine the possibility of promoting double fortification of salt with iron (it is already fortified with iodine).

It’s a Hindi journal that’s all set to hit Parliament’s stands in February. What will lend the journal an unusual element is that Lok Sabha MPs will be among those penning articles for it.

It pays to have a railway minister from your state. If her predecessors provided sweeter deals from the railways for their home states, current railway minister and Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has been busy doing the same for West Bengal. The bonanza for Bengal which began in 2009 shortly after Ms Banerjee took over the important railway portfolio picked up steam in the year just gone by, 2010.

It’s an ambitious effort to build a data base of India’s built heritage and antiquities and prevent both from gradually disappearing.

The railways is racing to meet a deadline. And how! With the next Railway Budget barely two months away, a flurry of letters has gone out from the Railway Board here directing various zonal railways to introduce the trains that were announced in the 2010-11 Railway Budget by railway minister Mamata Banerjee.

The government is seriously mulling over a proposal to institute a Tagore Award to rival the Nobel Prize in Literature. The institution of such an award is being considered as part of the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Rabindranath Tagore which will commence next year.

The just-concluded Winter Session of Parliament will probably go down in parliamentary history as one of its most unproductive, causing the nation a loss of crores of rupees and seeing virtually no legislative business being transacted.

It has been six months since Vivek Sahai, the then member (traffic), Railway Board, was elevated to the seniormost post in the railways, that of board chairman.

Taxpayers’ money running into lakhs may be going down the drain thanks to Parliament’s relentless disruption.