-The Economic Times For many, it is a sense of deja vu. Fifteen years ago, the government and India's financial regulators came under fire after hundreds of crores were cleaned up by a few individuals and entities from gullible investors, who were promised fabulous returns from plantation schemes. In the uproar that followed, the government and the regulators sought to palm off the responsibility of regulation of such schemes on each...

-The Hindustan Times The sorry plight of thousands of small savers duped by a deposit-collecting firm in West Bengal is, perhaps, symptomatic of a wider malaise that runs deep in the Indian economy. What if a company asked you to invest Rs. 200,000 and promised to give you Rs. 8,000 a month for five years and a swanky sedan at the end of the fifth year? What if a company asked...

-The Indian Express The proposed land bill will make transactions fairer and encourage optimal use of the resource In this session, Parliament will take up the necessary and long-delayed Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill. Both major parties have worked out a consensus on the features of the bill. As with any compromise between different interest groups, the bill does not please everyone perfectly, but it finally sets down reasonable terms for...

-The Indian Express Washington: India accounts for one-third of the world poor, people living on less than USD 1.25 (about Rs 65) per day, a World Bank report on poverty has said. The report said that 1.2 billion people still living in extreme poverty across the world. "The State of the Poor: Where are the Poor and Where are the Poorest?," using data released in the latest World Development Indicators, shows that extreme...

-The Economic Times The government's plan to make the Aadhaar number the centrepiece of the cash-transfer system is now facing opposition from a new quarter: banks. Several banks, led by the State Bank of India, have expressed reservation against jettisoning their current systems in favour of the platform created by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which issues the Aadhaar number and wants to make it the basis to authenticate...