AS THE UPA government struggled to hide its embarrassment over the finance ministry note on the 2G spectrum allocation, the RTI Act — through which the note was made public — has become the whipping boy. Senior Cabinet members such as Corporate Affairs Minister Veerappa Moily and Law Minister Salman Khurshid have hit out at the ‘misuse’ of the transparency law. Moily called for a national debate as he claimed RTI...

By asking the State-appointed interlocutors here on Tuesday to continue talks with the Maoists, to broker peace in the Jangalmahal region, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee may have indicated some flexibility in regard to the seven-day deadline she had given the extremists three days ago to lay down their arms and SIT for negotiations. “The dialogue process is on and will be continuing,” Sujato Bhadra, one of the key interlocutors,...

-The Hindu   The Goa government on Tuesday filed a reply before the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court to a Public Interest Litigation petition on illegal mining, claiming that the extraction, which the petitioner questioned, was from dumps and excess mining did not take place. The affidavit was submitted on behalf of Director of Mines and Geology Arvind Loliekar in the course of the hearing on the Goa Foundation's petition, which...

-The Hindu   Noted Jaipur-based economist V. S. Vyas has expressed concern over “progressive diminution” of cultivated holdings which he says has led to stagnation in the yield of major crops and rendered agricultural income insufficient for farmers to make ends meet. A sharp decline was also being witnessed in per capita food production, he said. Delivering the Tarlok Singh Memorial Lecture at the UniverSITy of Hyderabad over the weekend, Professor Vyas said...

-The Hindu   Stating that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's stand on the Maoist SITuation in the State reeked of “opportunism, duplicity, indecisiveness and vagueness,” Leader of the OppoSITion in the West Bengal Assembly Surya Kanta Mishra said here on Saturday that in the last four months she had done irreparable damage to the SITuation. Addressing a public rally at Jhargram during the day, Ms. Banerjee said that she had fulfilled her promise of...