-Frontline SHUBHANKAR DAM, Assistant Professor of Law at Singapore Management University School of Law, is the author of Presidential Legislation in India: The Law and Practice of Ordinances (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which has received wide acclaim among scholars of constitutional law. Against the backdrop of his insightful critique on the necessity of ordinances in a democracy, Professor Dam discusses in this interview the recent controversy triggered by the Bharatiya Janata...

-Frontline The problem in rural India is not one of too much credit to poor households that leads to debt waivers that damage bank balance sheets, but one of inadequate access to credit from formal sources. IF Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the...

-Business Standard The wide disparity between the best healthcare & quackery that much of the population must endure is partly to blame for India's apathy Whether Indians in ancient times discovered algebra and the Pythagoras theorem before "selflessly" passing them on to the Arabs and the Greeks as Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said last week is for agile historians to ponder. Widely accepted is that Indians in ancient times studied...

-The Hindu For the land-acquirer, the land act ordinance tries to lessen the indirect price of acquisition and transaction by diluting requirements for social impact assessments and referenda. For the land-loser, it not only retains all forms of compensation and rehabilitation, but also grows the number of those eligible for lucrative pay-offs The government of India continues to search for the right way to do land acquisition. Last week, the Union Finance...

-Business Standard The ordinance has returned near absolute power of discretion in land acquisition, except in tribal areas, into the hands of the bureaucracy yet again Even after the National Democratic Alliance's land ordinance, governments will still need the consent of tribal gram sabhas in all Schedule V and VI areas of the country before acquiring land for themselves or for public-private projects. While the land ordinance has done away with the need...