-The Hindu Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee may be sleeping easy as she has "settled all the issues at hand" on the Saradha scam. Saradha Group promoter Sudipto Sen has been booked and a Rs. 500-crore kitty has been created to make refunds to the depositors. However, no one is clear just how the refunds would be made and whether existing laws permit it. Mr. Sen's bubble may have burst. But the travails...

-The Hindu Business Line There can be no denying the need for a legal framework to ensure that the likes of Saradha do not take the entire financial system for a ride. But that said, there will always be greedy investors, willing to be taken in by the tall promises of unscrupulous operators. The latter's task is made easier by loopholes in the law. Hence, Ponzi operators used the legal loopholes...

-The Indian Express Kolkata: As the investigation into the Saradha chit fund scam threatens to reach the doorstep of the Trinamool Congress, the markets watchdog is learnt to have warned of a larger, more frightening scenario: similar Ponzi schemes run by at least five other companies in West Bengal, involving over Rs 4,000 crore of small investors' money. In its latest communication sent to the state government, the Securities and Exchange Board...

-The Hindu The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has served notices to 14 authorities directing them to remove all boards, nails and advertisements from trees falling under their jurisdictions and has directed the authorities to de-concretise the trees. Following a petition filed by Aditya N. Prasad and others, the Tribunal issued notices to three Union Ministries - Ministry of Environment and Forests, Ministry of Human Resources Development and the Ministry of Urban Development...

-The Indian Express Chandigarh: Slamming the Punjab government for sponsoring "xenophobia", the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday set aside its "discriminatory" rules, wherein it had allowed additional weightage to rural students for government jobs. A Full Bench comprising Justices Hemant Gupta, Ajay Tewari and R N Raina held the rules framed by Punjab as "illegal, unconstitutional" and beyond its "legislative competence". "State sponsored xenophobia is constitutional anathema and the principle...