-The Times of India The West Bengal government has managed a turnaround in revenue collection, thanks to innovative use of technology and the impending need to raise resources and repair the state's tattered finances. Data shows tax receipts during the first quarter of 2012-13 have risen 35%. In 2010-11, before the Trinamool Congress-led government came to power, tax collection by the Left Front government stood at Rs 21,000 crore, while in 2012-13...

-The Hindu With increasing demands for execution of Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru, the Amnesty International has urged President Pranab Mukherjee to immediately halt all death sentences and go with the internationally accepted principle of “right to life”. In a letter to Mr. Mukherjee, Amnesty International India Chief Executive G. Ananthapadmanaban urged him to commute all death sentences into terms of imprisonment, halt further executions and establish an official Moratorium on executions...

-The Hindu There is a need to identify cases in which the courts might have erred in applying the Bachan Singh principle that limits the imposition of the death penalty The Supreme Court’s five-judge Constitution Bench judgment in Bachan Singh (1980) is the source of contemporary death penalty jurisprudence in India. Its major contribution was to limit the imposition of death penalty to the rarest of rare crimes, and for laying down...

-First Post Predictably, the recommendation by an experts’ panel appointed by the Supreme Court  - that trials of genetically modified (GM) crops should be halted for 10 years – has stirred a hornet’s nest. Such a Moratorium would include ongoing trials and the court rejected it. This follows on the heels of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture’s 492-page report published in August which asked for the banning of GM food crops...

-PTI The hanging of 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab in a Pune jail comes a day after India opposed a UN General Assembly draft resolution which sought abolition of the death penalty, with New Delhi arguing that capital punishment in India is exercised in case of a crime so heinous that it "shocks" the conscience of society. Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist, had along with 9 other Pakistani gunmen killed over 160 people...