In planning, pursuit of profit was not seen as being in the social interest in the post-Independence years, but now profit is the sole motive. FOR two decades now the Government of India has pursued a policy of accelerated liberalisation, dismantling controls, diluting regulations and making the state a facilitator of private investment. It is not that the presence of the state has diminished during this period, but that its role...

-The Times of India   The Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) Bill, cleared by the cabinet last week, signals that the government`s heart is in the right place. Under its provisions, coal firms must share 26% of their net profits with project area residents, while non-coal miners will have to provide them a sum equal to royalty paid to state governments. No system is in place at present to properly compensate...

Is the Congress afraid of winning in Gujarat?  Nothing else explains why it lets Narendra Modi tom-tom development when it should have been the Congress banging the drums. The economic achievements of governments before Modi's read like an award citation, but too much secularism has since led the Congress astray. Instead of showcasing its past performance to regain Gujarat, it is obsessed with nailing Modi as a communalist-in-chief. Naturally, it is...

-The Hindustan Times   The much-criticised new poverty cutoff — proposed recently by the Planning Commission, it sets the bar for urban poverty at Rs 32 spent per person per day — would exclude many beggars in Mumbai, a survey has found. The survey, conducted over the past six months by University of Mumbai’s Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Centre for Social Justice in hutments across the city, found that only nine of 1,043...

In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...