-The Hindu     Minister relaxed tax benefit-related residency norms for foreign investors Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Tuesday allayed apprehensions over the imposition of wealth tax on agricultural land within urban area limits to provide a big relief to farmers, especially in Haryana and Punjab. Mr. Chidambaram relaxed the tax benefit-related residency norms for foreign investors routing funds through countries such as Mauritius and lowered the withholding tax rate to five per cent from...

-The Hindu "Freedom without limits is just a word" -Terry Pratchett Kamlesh Vaswani's PIL seeking to ban the viewing of pornography and make it a non-bailable offence has raised eyebrows. Columnists and social media commentators have greeted the idea with shock, raising issues such as social liberty, sexual freedom, and the fact that the mere banning of pornography might not bring down the incidence of rape. On the surface of it, this sounds...

-The Business Standard A trail of unfulfilled promises follow her in rural and urban Bengal The furious letter-writing since 2010 about the chit fund industry in West Bengal suggests that everyone knew the industry was going to implode. Bengal has one of the highest rates in small savings, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Somen Mitra wrote to the prime minister in 2011. The state buys the highest number of new life insurance policies, and...

-PTI Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has sought to blame the Centre for the chit fund scam, has claimed that the central government reduced the Rate of Interest in small savings to drive depositors towards ponzi schemes. "It is because the Centre has reduced the interest rates in small savings in the post office, poor people and those who have retired keep their money in these chit funds with...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...