-The Hindu Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, daughter of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and leading lawyer Prashant Bhushan are among 881 individual beneficiaries, Companies, societies and trusts granted permission in the last three years to buy land in Himachal Pradesh. The strict land laws that do not permit outsiders or non- agriculturists to buy farm land were relaxed for these select few. The matter of land transactions was raised by Congress MLA Rohit Thakur,...

-Frontline The Land Acquisition Bill runs into a roadblock as political parties fail to reach an agreement on the substantive features of the draft Bill or on the amendments proposed. The efforts of the United Progressive Alliance government to broker a consensus on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012, which has been pending for over a year, have not paid off not because...

-The Times of India The CPI (Maoist) has formed its own elite training 'institute' in the Dandakaranya forests, a Naxalite bastion, to transform tribal cadres into Communist professionals equipped to handle tasks related to the Central Committee, the outfit's apex decision-making body. The Buniyadi Communist Training School (BCTS), a brainchild of CPI (Maoist) top gun Ganapathy, has been churning out professionally-trained Communists since 2009 with basic military skills and knowledge of Hindi,...

-The Hindustan Times Cancer drugs will cost almost 25% less if the regulator implements a new formula that calls for a price cap. The price regulator National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) is considering a pricing mechanism similar to the one for insulin products - which has brought down prices by up to 40% - for 33 cancer drugs, most of them generics. Basically, the lowest price from the list of drugs in a...

-The Times of India Big pharma may be crying hoarse over India's "weak'' intellectual property environment, but over the past five years or so, they have introduced only a handful of their patented blockbusters in the country. That's not all. The contribution of patented drugs in the Rs 72,000-crore pharma retail market is not even 1%, indicating that multinationals have been traditionally slow and have a poor track record in introducing...