-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...

-The Hindustan Times In a ruling that would be music to the ears of babus, the Supreme Court (SC) has held that a government officer’s personal details such as income-tax (I-T) returns cannot be divulged in response to a query under the Right to Information Act (RTI) unless a larger public interest was involved. Disclosure of such information would amount to unwarranted invasion of an officer’s privacy, it said. “The performance of...

-CNN-IBN A kind of McCarthyism seems to be operating in the country. Just as the US Senator who gave the term its name saw communists lurking everywhere in the early 1950s, Arvind Kejriwal sees corruption behind every deal. He wants electricity consumers in Delhi not to pay bills, claiming that they are over-stated. He cites the cut in tariff which the former chairman of Delhi's electricity regulatory commission, Berjinder Singh, had recommended....

-The Hindu India Against Corruption should realise the ‘aam aadmi’ needs not only decentralised power but also a lofty vision There are two underlying themes of India Against Corruption’s new party: the induction of good people and “people’s power” through consummate decentralisation. The vision document sets out a quest for “swaraj,” people’s right to self-determination. This ideal of self-determination has been conflated with direct democracy. Thus the vision document indicates that “as...

-The Business Standard If Mr Vadra had to count his friends in the real estate business, they would be Corporation Bank, the Haryana government and DLF  Robert Vadra, who is at the centre of a controversy over his property dealings with realty giant DLF and others, began investing in real estate five years ago, in 2007-08. He was already a wealthy man by then, not a struggling businessman who could scrape only...