-The Telegraph The Centre has turned down the MAMata Banerjee government’s request to allot additional foodgrain to keep the state’s pet project of supplying grains at a subsidised rate to about 20 lakh people running in 2012-13. Although these people are “needy”, according to the state government, they are not part of the BPL category (annual income of less than Rs 30,000). The MAMata government gives rice at a subsidised rate of...

-The Telegraph The Economic Survey — prepared by Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the finance ministry — has some gratuitous advice for politicians like MAMata Banerjee who announced earlier this week plans to amend state legislation that will require co-operative banks to take government permission before seizing mortgaged property while trying to foreclose loans given to defaulting farmers. “The state provides the laws and enforcement to enable people to sign contracts,”...

-Express News Service On Wednesday, Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi lost his job for doing what two of his immediate predecessors — one of them his own party boss — could not. After 10 years, fares of passenger trains were finally increased in the rail budget that Trivedi presented, with the aim of pumping in much-needed funds into the financially ill national transport utility. Rolled out in two forms, the “fare rationalisation” models...

-The Telegraph Bengal’s co-operation department spent the better part of Tuesday on an unusual mission: how to enforce MAMata Banerjee’s very chief ministerial order to nail those who tried to recover money lent by a co-operative bank. “I have asked to lodge an FIR,” MAMata had declared yesterday while ordering the withdrawal of attachment notices on two farmers and announcing that the law will be changed to make government approval mandatory before...

-The Telegraph   Chief minister MAMata Banerjee has ordered an amendment to a state law to prevent rural co-operative banks from attaching the land of loan-defaulter farmers without government approval. The directive was issued after MAMata came across two posters by a co-operative bank controlled by Trinamul Congress leaders, which sought to auction the land of farmers who have not repaid loans. “I am assuring my brothers that nobody will go to confiscate your...