-The Hindustan Times To maintain a fine balance between allies’ pressure and investors’ sentiments, the UPA Government will let states decide their own limits on acquiring land for private projects. In its ambitious Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011, the Centre has bypassed recommendations of a parliamentary panel and will give states the power to fix their own ceilings. The draft bill prepared by UPA-1 ran into a hurdle over the...

The NAC lies defanged; the markets leap for joy at Manmohan’s & Co’s charge of a ‘new’ economy How swiftly things change. Just a month ago, the great Indian growth story was being written off. Now, the “new economy”, run by the PM-cum-FM, will sift through the rubble of under-seven per cent growth, find the hidden springs of recovery and throw in some reforms for good measure. A top taxman says...

-Inclusion.in There is good news. And there’s bad news. The good news first. There’s been a bumper wheat crop and the granaries are overflowing. And the bad news? Where do we begin? A lot of that grain will rot. Millions will still remain hungry. Heavily in debt and distressed, farmers are committing suicide. Food prices are soaring. There’s more… Farmers don’t have money. Their land is too small and isn’t yielding much. Fertilisers and...

-The Hindu Saving the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) — the centrepiece of UPA-I’s achievements in the social welfare sector — from its many critics in government and the media who view it as a drain on the exchequer will head the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC)’s agenda in the coming months. At a meeting of the reconstituted NAC on Friday, its members discussed the role a re-energised...

-The Telegraph Union home minister P. Chidambaram today expressed concern over Bengal’s “culture of violence” and advised “the so-called educated classes” to stop living in a “fool’s paradise”. The first part of the remarks by Chidambaram, who was speaking to industrialists on the need for democratic forms of dissent, was hotly contested by the Mamata Banerjee government that is already suspicious of the UPA because of the Left’s support to the central...