-The Hindustan Times The sorry plight of thousands of small savers duped by a deposit-collecting firm in West Bengal is, perhaps, symptomatic of a wider malaise that runs deep in the Indian economy. What if a company asked you to invest Rs. 200,000 and promised to give you Rs. 8,000 a month for five years and a swanky sedan at the end of the fifth year? What if a company asked...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: Gauhati High Court has taken up a suo motu PIL against the Calcutta-based Saradha Group and similar deposit collecting companies for allegedly duping scores of investors in Assam of their hard-earned money. Official sources said the high court recently took up the PIL (15/2013) after taking cognisance of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) general secretary and RTI activist Akhil Gogoi's letter to Chief Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel. Akhil had alleged...

-The Economic Times MUMBAI: The employees at ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank may have violated know-your-customer norms and helped clients evade taxes, the Reserve Bank of India's investigation has found. "Banks opened current account based on power of attorney without KYC," ET Now reported citing people familiar with the report. "Banks gave cash advances for gold purchases", which is a violation of norms, it said. The central bank and the...

-The Hindustan Times Far from the neatly trimmed lawns of India Gate that so often reverberate with cries for justice, far also from the corridors of power where ministries recently squabbled over the right age for consensual sex, lie 197 districts - yes 197, read the figure again - where children are regularly abused. In these districts -- all ridden by conflict -- words like illegal detention, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, torture...

-The Hindu Ahmedabad: Going by the Gujarat government's figures, memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) worth $876 billion were signed during its five biannual Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summits from 2003 to 2011 and a whopping 84 per cent of the projects have already been implemented or are under implementation. This would mean Gujarat has overtaken all of China, whose FDI inflows during this period were to the tune...