-The Times of India   For all those already reeling under a series of hikes in petrol prices on the back of zooming inflation, here is some news that will enrage you further. Data of retail prices in countries across the world shows that Indian prices are amongst the highest in the world at current exchange rates. And, if you even out the differences in purchasing power of different currencies then Indian...

The global 'farmland grab' in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa has become competitive, with companies from Asia, including India and China, joining it. AN extraordinary new process has been at work in the past few years: the aggressive entry of Indian corporations into the markets for agricultural land in Africa. At one level, this process is simply following the hoary old tradition in global capitalism of firms (often supported...

-The Telegraph   Labour laws will not be eased for the proposed national manufacturing investment zones (NMIZs), and there will be administrative arrangements for quick relief to workers in case a unit is closed. The government plans to generate 100 million jobs within a decade in these proposed zones. Proposals of flexible labour laws in these zones, which may have allowed hire-and-fire policies, had come under criticism from trade unions and as a...

-MensXP.com While everyone has been animatedly supporting Anna Hazare's fight against corruption, people seem to have forgotten who the people are who actually led to this situation. The peak of irony was when Anna was, allegedly, lodged in the same jail that housed the people who were responsible for two of the biggest scams in the country ever. How must the authorities have felt when they saw Raja and Kalmadi fill their...

For five years, they controlled the administration in impoverished Bellary, even flattened state boundary markers to excavate iron ore—while insisting they had no mining interests in Karnataka. Now, the reign of the rulers of the “Republic of Bellary”—as the unofficial influence of two Bharatiya Janata Party​ (BJP) ministers and a milk federation chief, collectively called the Reddy brothers—appears to be at an end. As the Supreme Court on Friday banned all mining...