-The Business Standard   The road to renewal of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Posco India seems to be bumpy with the officials of the steel firm and the Orissa government failing to reach a consensus even though the pact lapsed on June 21 last year. In the latest of their series of interactions with the state government, the Posco India officials on Wednesday met state Chief Secretary B K Patnaik and steel...

Sections within civil society have Reservations about Anna Hazare’s movement but the government’s failure to tap them may have lent credence to the impression that his group was speaking up for the entire nation. Although leaders like P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal have argued that no single group could claim to be the sole representative of civil society, the Centre has not seriously tried to open channels of communication with other...

-IANS   Eminent agriculture scientist and a member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), M.S. Swaminathan, has cautioned against the government's plan to replace subsidised food with cash under the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA). "The government's plan to replace subsidised ration with cash under the public distribution system (PDS) is faulty. It will lead to low procurement and less production subsequently. This will be bad for Indian agriculture," Swaminathan...

-The Economic Times   Stepping out to fight the media hullabaloo surrounding Team Anna's campaign against corruption, the government unleashed a counterblitzkrieg on Tuesday, using a media briefing - that went live on most news channels - to insist that one man alone could not hold Parliament to ransom on the Lokpal Bill. "Here is one man (Anna) who is saying that only my law should be enacted ...and if it is...

Through every stage of environmental clearance, the Prime Minister's Office and the finance ministry tracked the Rs 54,000-crorePosco integrated steel plant with keen interest even as the environment ministry sidestepped its own Reservations to let the project pass, records with TOI show. The records accessed from the environment ministry do not show any interference from the two quarters but the PMO and the finance ministry followed the case from 2007...