-The Telegraph New Delhi: The government today gave in to the Opposition and referred the bill for regulating Real estate to a select committee for scrutiny. Urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu brought a motion for sending the bill to the committee, to be headed by BJP MP Anil Madhav Dave. The 21-member panel will have to hand in its report at the start of the monsoon session. The Opposition had demanded examination...

-FirstPost.com Anshuman Magazine, chairman and managing director of CBRE South Asia Pvt. Ltd., in a recent article writes that “around 1.2 crore completed houses” are “lying vacant across urban India”. This one number tells us all that is wrong with Indian Real estate. Even though there is a huge housing shortage in urban India, 1.2 crore completed homes are lying vacant. As the latest Economic Survey points out: “At present urban housing...

-Livemint.com Agriculturists’s woes are not just forms of a crisis, but also indicate the deceleration of the agrarian economy Unseasonal rain, falling commodity prices, increasing input costs, decreasing size of land holdings, and now the political move to “acquire” all land into the globalizing market. The agony-list that agriculturists can make of their current situation can be even longer for all these are not just forms of a crisis, but also indicate...

-The Hindu India cannot continue with a pattern of industry that yields so few jobs but has such a large ecological footprint. Neither can it be excited by the urban nightmares that its cities are today. The land law debate must be the occasion to talk about these key national agendas The current debate on the land law is important because it affords us a chance to reflect more deeply on the...

-Hindustan Times Hamirpur/ Jalaun/ Banda: The dangerous sand mafia stops at nothing. It kills, runs over men in uniform, kidnaps and, in Uttar Pradesh, even molests and rapes. Its impunity stems from the fact, as an HT investigation found, that complaints lodged with police often remain confined to files. Shivpal Singh, gram pradhan of Bansariya village, testifies to the mafia’s dominance. “In March 2014, the musclemen of a kingpin sexually assaulted two women...