SC lays down eight rules to streamline the PIL movement and wants the courts to follow them What the development of public interest litigation (PIL) and right to information has done to the justice delivery system can be compared, with a little exaggeration, to the growth of mobile telephony and Internet in Communications. The only fear is that they may act like unruly horses at times. Public interest petitions have been filed...

I have been an advisor to The Energy and Resources Institute or Teri, a distinguished visiting fellow there since 1996, except when I was the chairman of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, the director-general of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, the chairman of the Institute for Social and Economic Change and on boards of management and economic research institutions. This disclaimer is intended to forestall motives being ascribed...

Finally, relief may be on way for the state which had put all its resources on stake last year in order to retain the status of “food sufficient nation” for India. The Union government is likely to release Rs 800 crore for Punjab as compensation for all the drastic measures that the state took in order to sustain paddy crop last year in the wake of severe drought which had...

The Nitish Kumar government has earned the power to confiscate the property of corrupt public servants with the Centre eventually giving its assent to the Bihar Special Court Bill, 2008. The state legislature had passed the bill and sent to the Union government for presidential nod. But the central government failed to clear it for a year apparently because of the pressure of what is learnt to be the “IAS lobby”....

Is Bihar on steroids, boosted by an excessive stimulus of dramatically higher public outlays than ever in the past? Like all stimulus, does it also bear the danger of slumping back when it is withdrawn? Is the widely acclaimed growth turnaround a durable and sustainable one? These are among the many issues, which are currently being debated. But first the facts. Bihar is the best turnaround story that the country has seen...