-The Times of India The government has been unable to explain why public sector firms imported pulses at a loss of 21%-30% a year from 2006 to 2011 adding up to Rs 1,200 crore, while private importers did not appear to have suffered such a misfortune. Questioned by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee about the " pulses scam" revealed in a Comptroller and Auditor General report, senior commerce and consumer affairs officials has...

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report on the 2G Spectrum has created a great deal of controversy and his role is being questioned. The Public Accounts Committee could not finalise its report due to the splitting on the issue on party lines. The JPC currently examining the matter has taken an unprecedented step of taking evidence of a junior officer of the CAG’s set up, since retired, and quizzed the...

-The Economist   Opposition to the world’s biggest biometric identity scheme is growing FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges—feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads—it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world’s biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities. Launched in 2010, under a genial ex-tycoon, Nandan Nilekani, the “unique identity” (UID) scheme is supposed to roll out trustworthy, unduplicated identity numbers based on...

-The Times of India In a follow-up action to the scathing CAG report on the sub-standard foodstuff and rations being provided to soldiers, the parliamentary public accounts committee (PAC) is said to have blasted the defence establishment and the Army for "deep-rooted and widespread malpractices". The PAC report, expected to be tabled in Parliament soon, conducted a detailed examination of last year's CAG report that punched several gaping holes in Army's entire...

The internal documents of the CAG present a different picture to the one presented by PAC’s chairman Murli Manohar Joshi The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) tried repeatedly to get the government’s auditor to share with him details of its audit of the controversial allocation of second-generation telecom spectrum in 2008 (known as the 2G scam), according to documents reviewed by Mint. The internal documents of the Comptroller and Auditor...