-The Business Standard railway engineers would help gram panchayats in developing estimates of the work and in training workers Union railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal today announced a partnership between Indian railways and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in his budget speech. "I thank (Minister of Rural Development) Jairam Ramesh for agreeing to the railways' request to partner in some of the rail-related activities under MGNREGS," he said. Bansal...

-PTI Indian railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has been slapped with a fine of Rs 10 lakh by a consumer forum here for selling soft drinks above the maximum retail price (MRP) to two customers. The New Delhi District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum imposed "punitive compensation" of Rs 5 lakh each in two separate cases against IRCTC, a subsidiary of Indian railways, and said being a government corporation, "it is not...

-The Times of India railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal on Tuesday announced many initiatives in his Rail Budget 2013 speech that will bring cheer to middle-income passengers. From better e-ticketing facilities to free wi-fi on select trains, the railway Budget will lead to implementation of many passenger friendly measures. Here is a look at some of them: 1) e-ticketing through mobile phones. Project of SMS alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status. In...

-The Business Standard State budgets are raining sops to pull farmers' votes With elections staring at them, several state governments are suddenly waking up to the demands of farmers and offering sops to the agriculture sector in their budgets, even as farmer organisations say the state and Central governments should do more.    Karnataka, which pioneered the trend of having a separate agriculture budget--similar to the railway budget at the Centre — brought...

-The Hindu Instead of the present opaque system, a high-level, broad-based Committee should be formed to choose the country’s “most important” constitutional functionary In May this year, the present Comptroller and Auditor-General will retire on completing 65 years of age. Given the Government of India’s exasperation with him, it seems very probable that for the next CAG, it will look for someone who is likely to be bland and ignorable, and quite...