As many as 56 villages in the Saranda forests, freed from over 10 years of Maoist dominance in a month-long offensive in August, is set to see a new era of development with the Centre planning to showcase it as a test case to prove that police action is no impediment to building Social Infrastructure. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who visited the Jharkhand capital last week, has sent a...

A new draft Bill holds much promise to augment the development delivery mechanism. It is the new mining Bill, 2011, which has specific provisions for earmarking funds for development purposes in the mineral-rich districts that happen to be the regions with high poverty ratios. Revamped mining legislation can boost transparency in the vexed sector that seems much prone to illegality, corruption and extensive fraud.  Further, a well-crafted mining law can actually...

-The Times of India   Should government-run companies invest in tobacco firms? This is the question that Voices of Tobacco Victims (VoTV), an NGO working for cancer patients, has raised after its recent query under the RTI Act revealed that the Life Insurance Corporation of India has invested up to Rs 3,500 crore in various tobacco companies. "It's the greatest irony that the government spends Rs 10,000 crore on treatment of tobacco-related illnesses...

The underlying assumption of the proposed Land Acquisition Bill seems that the price paid to farmers is unreasonably low due to dominant power of industrial buyers, requiring government intervention. The draft, however, may neither accelerate the pace of land acquisition for industry nor overcome the psychological barriers of landowners that impede land transfers. First, the psychological barriers that limit supply. One of the main reasons for the farmers’ (and land dependents’)...

-NDTV Profit   Some of India’s biggest and most-respected entrepreneurs have released an open letter to the government. The group which includes Wipro’s Azim Premji, Anu Aga of Thermax and HDFC's Deepak Parekh, refers to the anti-corruption Lokpal Bill that is meant to be introduced soon in Parliament. The industrialists write, “The Lokpal Bill is only one small but critical step in the national task of weeding out the plague of corruption...