-The Telegraph The Economic Survey — prepared by Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the finance ministry — has some gratuitous advice for politicians like Mamata Banerjee who announced earlier this week plans to amend state legislation that will require co-operative banks to take government permission before seizing mortgaged property while trying to foreclose loans given to defaulting farmers. “The state provides the laws and enforcement to enable people to sign contracts,”...

-DNA Country’s first chief information commissioner (CIC), Wajahat Habibullah, told law and mass communication students about the true strength of the Right To Information (RTI) Act, 2005. He said RTI Act is not a weapon to be used against the government but to strengthen the system, exposing the weaknesses within its functioning. He was speaking at a daylong workshop on ‘RTI and media—Partners for priority’ organised by Symbiosis Institute of Media and...

Ten years after the killings in Gujarat, Narendra Modi has neither expressed regret nor has he been held accountable for those mass deaths. Where do we go from here? Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.   Just thinking of it, a shiver runs down my spine. I had my own brush with how the Hindutva gangs carried out the...

As non-governmental organisations question the relevance of the World Water Forum being held here this week and slam its "corporate" nature, the United Nations says that a coordinated approach to managing and allocating water is critical. The fourth edition of the triennial World Water Development Report (WWDR), which brings together the work of 28 U.N.-Water members and partners is being officially launched Monday at the Forum. It stresses that water "underpins...

Nature serves well even when rivers run dry. Students of Government Polytechnic-Nirsa who recently unearthed four artesian wells in a rocky stretch of Dhanbad, will surely vouch for the natural source of water that promises succour as another arid summer looms. The nine final-year civil engineering (diploma) students, under the guidance of senior lecturer of the institute Suresh Prasad Yadav, spotted the four wells in Baliapur block of the district — one...