-Governance Now A CAG report dated March 15, 2013 had found Uttarakhand sitting on a time bomb, with nearly zero disaster preparedness back in Sept 2012 when the nationwide performance audit was done. Will other states, marked equally poorly in the audit, sit up and smell the coffee? The massive disaster in Uttarakhand has brought to the fore not only the old debate of ecology versus development but also thrown up...

-The Hindu   A concern about the Food Security Bill is that legal entitlement has been weakened to mean a passive right to receive whatever the state gives The hallmark of the National Food Security Bill 2011 is that if implemented it will translate into India's first ever right to food legislation, guaranteeing food as a justiciable, legal entitlement to its people. However, in its current form, the Bill fails to evolve a...

-The Hindu     Non-implementation of the 1997 judgment in the money laundering case shows that freeing the CBI from political interference is a challenge even for the apex court "Our first exercise will be to liberate CBI from political interference." This is what the Supreme Court said while deliberating the coal scam status report. It is not the first time that the court will be embarking on such a project. A similar exercise...

-The Indian Express Kolkata: Saradha Realty Ltd, which has gone bust now, may be just the beginning of the unfolding of a deeply entrenched Ponzi scheme network involving dozens of other companies in West Bengal, some of which also wield considerable media power given their ownership of television channels and newspapers. According to information available with the union corporate affairs and finance ministries, six companies, against whom market regulator Securities and Exchange...

-Bloomberg The entire land could be handed over by June to Posco, which already has about 1,700 acres in its possession Mumbai: Orissa expects to complete procuring land needed forPosco's steel complex in less than two weeks as farmers relinquish their opposition on the proposed $12 billion project. About 200 acres (81 hectares) out of the total 2,700 acres are left to be acquired from local residents, said Satya Kumar Mallick, the administrative...