-The Telegraph The government today dug out a 2006 verdict to argue that the Supreme Court was against auction of coal blocks as law minister Salman Khurshid questioned the presumptive revenue loss of Rs 1.86 lakh crore in the allocation of 57 blocks. Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari, who addressed a joint media conference with Khurshid, read out the verdict that had nullified the NDA Government’s plan for e-auction of coal blocks. The verdict...

-The Business Standard An industry capable of bringing down governments has chosen to keep quiet about the creeping corruption in its own backyard You can pay newspapers to get any kind of article published, ditto for news channels. You can fix TV ratings or readership numbers. You can even fix the box-office figures for your film. And if nothing works, you can always entice a media buyer with a cutback to...

-The Hindu Move to improve post-matric scholarship scheme yet to create immediate impact Over 40 per cent of seats earmarked for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes in engineering courses have gone unfilled at the end of counselling. There is no surprise element this year as the current figure of vacancy conforms to the trend, going by the data of admission and vacancy since 2009, when a sub-quota of three per cent for Arunthathiyars was created...

Two sets of government data on UPA government's most famous flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), for which Rs. 33000 crore was earmarked in 2012-13 budget, provide widely different figures for several states, a feature which experts say is indicative of the corruption in the scheme and weakness of social audit or accountability. The government has increasingly relied on Management Information System (MIS) for monitoring NREGA at...

-The Hindu CAG’s concept of presumptive loss flawed: Chidambaram Upset at the “unreasonable” disruption of Parliament by the BJP on the issue of allocation of coal blocks and the CAG report, the government went on the offensive on Friday, terming totally flawed the Comptroller and Auditor-General’s concept of presumptive loss and maintaining that no loss took place because the coal was still unexploited. “The policy for allocation of coal blocks has been the...