-The Hindu Business Line   The general tendency among Indian policy makers currently is to blame international price movements for the rise in prices of essential food items in India. The extent to which this claim is valid is assessed by examining the specific case of wheat. It is no secret that Indian food prices are increasingly affected by international prices. Ever since 2002, when all quantitative restrictions on Indian imports of agricultural...

-The Hindustan Times Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has aptly described the persistence of mass undernutrition in India as a "national shame". What is even more shameful, however, is the passivity of the government - and of the country - towards this humanitarian emergency. The passivity begins with a reluctance to face the facts. The first step towards more effective nutrition policies in India is regular monitoring of the nutrition status of...

-The Telegraph Calcutta: Mamata Banerjee's zeal for a new anti-fraud bill could delay action against Saradha for months but has only a few differences with the old Left-sponsored bill her government has withdrawn, officials said today. "Except for three provisions and a few other minor changes, the language of the two bills is identical," a law department official said. A senior Writers' bureaucrat said the legislative steps that the new bill must...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: A 22-year-old post graduate student and leader of CPM's students' wing SFI, died of injuries sustained in police custody, prompting the Left Front to demand a judicial probe on Tuesday while chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her senior cabinet colleagues attended the IPL inauguration ceremony barely a few km away. Police claimed SFI state committee member Sudipto Gupta's death was an accident while the victim's kin alleged...

-The Hindu Police do not deny that it was a case of death in police custody, but say they exercised restraint Kolkata: The death of a State committee member of the Students Federation of India (SFI), students' wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), allegedly in police custody has created a stir here and raised fresh questions about police excesses in the State. Sudipta Gupta, who completed his post-graduation from the Rabindra...