-The Business Standard The latest suicide in Vidarbha underlines the need for flexible loan repayment norms for farmers Is it better to give compensation to dead farmers, or to provide loans and insurance to those who are alive? In the case of a majority of cotton farmers in Maharashtra, who are struggling against shrinking land size, production costs and debts, there is neither credit or insurance when alive nor compensation on death. Farmers caught...

-The Hindu   The parliamentary committees on the howitzer scam and the stock market scandal protected the powerful and failed to fix accountability. The same is true in the spectrum case The current political situation brings back memories of 1989. The Prime Minister then was under a cloud in the Bofors scam. Many of his close associates like Lalit Suri and Ajitabh Bachchan were accused of wrong-doing. Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: For a man who prides himself as being the "original reformer", PM Manmohan Singh did not mention the word "reforms" even once in his speech on the ninth anniversary of UPA. And, it was only once that he talked of inflation. It was hardly surprising given that reforms do not seem to be on his radar in view of the tough political environment and inflation is...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-Live Mint/ Bloomberg Conflicts between industry and farmers getting worse as water becomes more and more scarce Sachin Ingale slipped out of his family's two-room, white-painted mud hut about 4pm and walked into their farm field where the 22-year-old took a deep swig of pesticide from a plastic bottle. He died later that evening. Four months later, the mercury is pushing 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in his village in...