-The Hindu Gumla (Jharkhand): There had been an employees' strike at the college since February. Mukesh Sahu, 21, a second-year B.Sc. student, spent the Thursday afternoon in March running errands at Gumla market. As he sat down near the town pond to catch up with his college friends, his phone rang. "Naveen has been shot. The police shot him." It was his uncle, a couple of years older than him,...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: Bengal finance minister Amit Mitra is in the CPM's firing line for attending a three-day Banga Sammelan at Las Vegas last year in which Sudipta Sen's Saradha Group was the main sponsor. A few days ago, the CPM had asked the government to reveal who sponsored chief minister Mamata Banerjee's chartered flight from Delhi on April 10. Mitra rejected the insinuations and said the state exchequer...

-The Business Standard A trail of unfulfilled promises follow her in rural and urban Bengal The furious letter-writing since 2010 about the chit fund industry in West Bengal suggests that everyone knew the industry was going to implode. Bengal has one of the highest rates in small savings, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Somen Mitra wrote to the prime minister in 2011. The state buys the highest number of new life insurance policies, and...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-The Hindustan Times Demanding a CBI inquiry into Saradha Group financial scam, CPI(M) has accused chief minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew of being involved in Ponzi schemes. "Mamata Banerjee's nephew Abhishek Banerjee, who is the leader of Trinamool Youth Congress, runs a company which is involved in real estate and micro-finance and has made a huge amount of money in the last two to three years. Its turnover has skyrocketed to 300 crores...