-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: Indian companies have acquired land more than nine times the size of Delhi on foreign shores, as cultivable land at home is lost to urbanisation, industry and infrastructure projects. Land Matrix, a global land monitoring initiative that tracks land dealings worldwide, placed India among the top 10 countries that have acquired large tracts of land abroad, primarily for agriculture, in Africa and Asia. The country ranks eighth,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Nearly three of every four students shortlisted for the Indian Institutes of Technology this year come from two of the country's 29 school boards, an analysis of the results has shown. The results have confirmed a long-standing suspicion: distribution of students who made it to the elite tech schools is not uniform across the two national and 27 state boards. The analysis has shown that of the nearly...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With the World Heath Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer declaring air pollution as a major cause of cancer, its findings have put the focus on Indian hotspots like Delhi, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Jharkhand which showed high concentration of life-threatening air pollutants. Air quality data of the government's pollution watchdog, Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), for 2010 - the last one in the...

-The Telegraph Mumbai: Just when India Inc is battling a welter of accusations about crony capitalism, Transparency International has put out a report that will buttress its argument that the CBI-inspired witch hunt to name and shame some of the best-known business barons in the country is "preposterous and unwarranted". The report says Indian companies have the greatest commitment to fight corruption and the best internal systems in place to do so...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: On the eighth anniversary of India's landmark transparency legislation today, data mined on the Right to Information (RTI) Act shows it is, indeed, India's sunshine law, with an estimated 40 lakh people using the Act during 2011-12, the latest year for which all-India data is available. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an independent organisation closely associated with the RTI legislation, data-mined annual reports filed by the...