Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar (TOI March 25 and ET March 28) has strongly defended the Planning Commission's stance that there is nothing amiss with the poverty line drawn at Rs 22.40 in rural areas and Rs 28.65 in urban areas (down from initial estimates of Rs 32 and Rs 26, respectively). Let us discount the copious tears being shed by various politicians and their parties on this new line of poverty...

-The Business Standard   Learning from the jatropha mistake The tropical shrub jatropha curcas, touted a decade ago as a commercially feasible source of bioFuel to alleviate the global energy crisis, seems to have let its proponents down quite comprehensively. Millions of hectares of land in the arid areas of India and in many other Asian and African countries were turned into jatropha plantations in the expectation that the oil derived from its...

The Budget provides proof of the United Progressive Alliance government having forgotten the importance of its own “flagship schemes”. BUDGET 2012-13 provides conclusive proof that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has lost its way. It has managed the remarkable feat of upsetting almost everyone and making no one happy. The Budget is highly regressive in both taxation and spending terms and will raise prices of essentials, so aam aurat and...

The coal ministry has told the national auditor that its observations about “windfall gains” to private and state-run entities as a result of allocation of coal blocks without auction were “fallacious and erroneous”.   The ministry has rejected the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG)’s observation that due process was not followed in allocating blocks, and insisted that a “fair and transparent” system was followed, and decisions taken after intense scrutiny and extensive...

-The Telegraph The Centre today told the Supreme Court that no prosecution could be launched against armed forces fighting “counter-insurgency” and sought four months to decide whether to grant sanction to prosecute officers over a 12-year-old alleged fake encounter in Kashmir. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, invoked in “disturbed areas”, specifically mandates prior sanction before any prosecution can begin, the government told the court while replying to a notice on the...