-The Times of India Expectedly, CAG's reports on coal, power and Delhi airport have raised a storm. Yes, one takeaway is the need for transparency in resource disbursal and use, be it minerals or land. But if CAG - whose job is to keep accounts - habitually hypothesises about presumptive revenue loss owing ostensibly to absence of this or that policy in the past, where will it end? Its coal audit...

-The Economic Times The three reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on coal, ultra-mega power projects and airports, playing out in the public discourse as major indictments of corruption and of the government, serve only to spread confusion and convert infrastructure building into a political battleground. The reports are ill-informed by commercial logic, sometimes deficient in factual detail. However, since they bear the authority of a constitutional body, the...

-The Hindu One of the first principles that students of auditing are taught is that auditors are watchdogs and not bloodhounds. The Manmohan Singh government would have us believe, in the wake of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s reports first in the 2G case and now in the coal Mining issue, that this basic principle is being violated by the incumbent CAG. Why should the CAG comment on the...

-The Hindu Certain section of population seeks relaxation of ban on tourism; specialists are against any dilution of the scheme The Tamil Nadu Government’s latest notifications on demarcation of core and buffer zones of three tiger reserves in the State may still require a fine-tuning to strike a balance among ecology protection, tribal welfare and tourism promotion, feel conservationists and wildlife experts. As the demand for relaxation of the ban on tourism becomes...

-The Hindu Forest Bench says statutory clearance is a must   The Forest Bench of the Supreme Court on Friday made it clear that no iron ore Mining operations in Karnataka shall be permitted to resume unless there was statutory clearance for Mining and till reclamation and rehabilitation was implemented in full. The Bench, comprising Justice Aftab Alam, Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan and Justice Swatanter Kumar, took the decision after the Central Empowered Committee in...