-The Hindu Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel's report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group This is a challenging time in India's development history where a number of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking,...

-Live Mint Panchayat-related caste violence continues unabated and has become a part of the social reality today In ancient India, the panchayat system was based on the age-old caste system, social status and family. Although the local self-government concept was introduced in 1882, it took more than 100 years for the local self-government institutions to become a part of the Indian Constitution. While tremendous possibilities have been opened up in the...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: The CBI is sending a team to Guwahati on Tuesday to "screen" the cases registered against fraud deposit collecting companies in the state. Press adviser to the Assam chief minister, Bharat Chandra Narah, told The Telegraph, "A CBI team will reach here on Tuesday to examine the cases and after that, we will start the formalities of handing over the cases to them." "This shows the seriousness with which the...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-Greater Kashmir Jammu: Notwithstanding the pitiable condition of rural sanitation across J&K, the state government has not been able to utilize generous central funding under Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), which has now been renamed as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), in the past three years. In the year 2010-11, out of total available funds of Rs 2373.18 lakhs, the concerned state government agencies could expend only Rs 1715.26 lakhs. The situation noticed a...