-The Economic Times State levies on grain purchase by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) will reportedly push up the Centre's food subsidy bill by Rs 10,000 crore this fiscal year.  This is absurd and untenable. High taxes and commissions - 14.5% in Punjab and 10.5% in Haryana - on the minimum support price (MSP) of grain jack up the costs of procurement, drive private trade out of these markets, and set...

-The Telegraph The Maharashtra government today cleared a proposal to ban the manufacture, storage, Distribution and sale of gutkha and paan masala. The state has become the fourth, after Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, to impose such curbs. The decision was taken at a cabinet meeting presided over by chief minister Prithviraj Chavan this evening, sources said. But there was no announcement as the Assembly’s monsoon session is on. It could be done...

-The Times of India   The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed that the government had reasons to doubt its verdict laying down auction as the only way of allocating natural resources, in what is seen as an indication of a significant judicial rethink.  "On cancellation of spectrum licences allotted without following a transparent system, there is no doubt about its correctness. But if one reads the judgment to mean that auction must be...

-The Telegraph Union food minister K.V. Thomas today claimed the Bengal government had distributed only a small fraction of foodgrain specially allotted last year for 10 backward districts, drawing a sharp rebuttal from the state, as another confrontation with the Centre unfolded over figures. Thomas’s comment came days after Union home minister P. Chidambaram had voiced concern over Bengal’s “culture of violence” and cited casualty figures that were contested by the Mamata...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...