-The Telegraph Kolkata: The Mamata Banerjee government is scrambling to stitch together a cogent response to the default crisis that is escalating by the hour. The ruling establishment's agony has been compounded by the close ties several of its ministers, MPs and MLAs had nurtured with the collapsed Saradha Group. Within Trinamul and the government, questions are being asked about what senior leaders and ministers were doing while the crisis was building up...

-The Times of India A significant part of the Manmohan Singh government's political agenda for the 2014 election looks set to sail through Parliament with an all-party meeting on Thursday putting its seal of approval on a contentious bill on land acquisition that enhances compensation for farmers. The government countered criticism that the bill's provisions make land acquisition more time consuming while pushing up costs, but all major political parties seemed...

-The Times of India It is universally recognised that for ensuring people's participation in governance and holistic development, the best instrumentality is local government. So when Parliament passed the 73rd Constitution Amendment Bill on December 23, 1992 to enshrine the essential features of panchayats in the Constitution, this was hailed as historic. But where do our panchayats stand 20 years after becoming institutions of self-government? A big issue before the founders of...

-The Telegraph Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has started reaching out to leaders ahead of an all-party meeting next week to decide the final shape of the land acquisition bill. Ramesh today met the BJP's Arun Jaitley, the Rajya Sabha leader of Opposition, and the CPM's Sitaram Yechury to convince them about the provisions of the Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill, which seeks to replace the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Talks...

-The Indian Express If the BJP finds itself on the back foot today, it isn't because of corruption scandals, but due to the splintering of its social coalition As the stage is set for the state assembly elections in Karnataka, former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda recently made a surprising admission: corruption is not an issue in the upcoming elections, and the precipitous decline in political morality can only be arrested by...