-The Hindu Business Line   The general tendency among Indian policy makers currently is to blame international price movements for the rise in prices of essential food items in India. The extent to which this claim is valid is assessed by examining the specific case of wheat. It is no secret that Indian food prices are increasingly affected by international prices. Ever since 2002, when all quantitative restrictions on Indian imports of agricultural...

-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...

-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...

-The Indian Express Imphal: Alice Kamei had been missing for two days when Sundari got the call. What the voice on the other end said about her 14-year-old daughter has turned the world of this family living in Chingphu Kabui village in Manipur's Bishnupur district upside down. "It was a call from the RPF (Revolutionary People's Front). They said that Alice had come to them of her own will," says Sundari. "They...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: You could be popping certain pills and combinations that are illegally approved, harmful, cleared without proper clinical trials or even banned in the US and other countries. Delivering a severe rap on the government's knuckles, a parliamentary standing committee on health has charged it with "dilly-dallying and procrastination'' over serious irregularities in approval of life-saving medicines, not following the global ban on harmful drugs, and failing...