-One World South Asia The recent report on paid news by Press Council of India recommends that representation of the People Act, 1951, should be amended to make the practice of paid news a punishable electoral malpractice. The Report defines paid news as Any news or analysis appearing in any media (Print & Electronic) for a price in cash or kind as consideration. The Report records that “Sections of the media in India...

-The Hindu Business Line   Input subsidy expenses not contributing to boost productivity The World Bank has said that South Asia's foodgrain stock management, especially in India, needs to improve to tackle inflation. In its focus on food inflation in South Asia, the bank said that high stocks have led to high wastage due to inadequate storage capacity and technology. According to World Bank's estimates, the Food Corporation of India lost 10-16 million tonnes...

The government is mulling a raft of incentives for special economic zone developers to encourage them to move away from urban centres and focus on economically backward regions. A senior official in the commerce ministry said SEZ developers might get wider tax concessions if they build economic hubs in underdeveloped areas. The government may also lower the minimum area ceiling to ease land acquisition by them, the official said. These incentives...

Farmers will not have to cough up any tax upfront on the compensation money they receive for their land acquired by the government. The rural development ministry has clarified after complaints that in absence of clear rules the harshest provisions were being imposed. "We have issued orders that all compensation money for agricultural land acquisitions in both urban and rural areas should be made without any deductions," said an official in...

The global 'farmland grab' in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa has become competitive, with companies from Asia, including India and China, joining it. AN extraordinary new process has been at work in the past few years: the aggressive entry of Indian corporations into the markets for agricultural land in Africa. At one level, this process is simply following the hoary old tradition in global capitalism of firms (often supported...