The Comptroller and Auditor-General of India has found that the Naveen Patnaik government has ‘misused' the Land Acquisition Act for acquiring land for several big industrial projects, including the proposed mega steel plant by South Korean steel major Posco. “Emergency Provisions of Section 17 (4) were misused and applied arbitrarily even without indicating detailed justification for the same and without fulfilment of prescribed conditions,” the CAG has stated. The CAG report...

Under fire over data integrity issues, the government has tasked a panel to revise the wholesale price index (WPI) with the mandate to "enhance the reliability" of official statistics on all inflation measures.  The 31-member panel, to be headed by Planning Commission member Saumitra Chaudhuri, has also been asked to explore the possibility of getting a single agency to collect data for compiling WPI and industrial production that are hitherto dealt...

Nowhere are the argumentative Indians more visible than in the cacophony surrounding poverty estimates. Poverty is declining; inequality is increasing; no one can live on Rs 28 a day; nine per cent of Indians are poor; 70 per cent of Indians are poor. Poverty is too important to be used as ping-pong between optimists and pessimists on the Indian economy. I am deeply disillusioned to discover that there are no certainties...

The purpose of this piece is not to defend the Planning Commission on poverty figures but to indicate that the methodologies have evolved over time after considerable research and they are useful for policy purposes if not for linking with entitlement programmes (some of us have written earlier that the poor and vulnerable are more numerous than the commission's poverty figures and these should be delinked from entitlement programmes).  The commission...

-The Hindu The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court on Tuesday reserved its order till April 10 on a plea for making public the report of the Supreme Court–appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) on the 2002 Gulberg Society carnage. The SIT submitted the report in a sealed cover last month and all the documents and evidences of over 20,000 pages earlier this month in five locked trunks for the court's perusal. ...