-The Economic Times National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy has criticised the government for failing to deliver on land reforms. Criticising the UPA dispensation for not convening a single meeting of the National Land Reforms Council (NLRC) since it was constituted over four years ago, Roy on Monday told ET that this reflected an "absolute lack of intent and the symbolic manner in which governments respond to some the most basic...

-The Times of India It was meant to showcase the government's new-found resolve to push the reforms agenda in order to stanch the declining growth rate and to repulse the perception of governance freeze. Instead, it ended up publicizing yet again the government's vulnerability as well as its reluctance to speed up decision making at the cost of angering allies on the eve of presidential poll.  The UPA on Thursday withdrew its...

Union Cabinet approves negotiating brief   India will head to the Rio+20 summit in Brazil with a negotiating brief focussed on defending the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR) and preventing any attempt to pin down specific goals or targets regarding sustainable development. On Thursday, the Union Cabinet approved the strategy to be followed by Indian negotiators at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly known as Rio+20 due to the...

Desired outcomes can be reached through a series of ‘imperfect’ small initiatives What is to be done? How can we untie the Gordian knot that has so entangled the political economy of petroleum product prices? This is the question that now exercises our most experienced politicians and our ablest economists. Most well informed people know that a country that imports 80 per cent of its oil requirements cannot de-link itself from the...

-The Telegraph The Centre has renewed efforts to forge a consensus on allowing foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail by writing to all chief ministers, seeking to drive home the urgency against the backdrop of grim economic data. “Letters have been written to all chief ministers to build consensus to open up the multi-brand retail sector to FDI,” a commerce ministry official said. The statement came a day after the country posted its...