-The Telegraph The Supreme Court has disbanded its 17-year-old green sentinel. The court has wound up its green bench that sat every Friday since 1995 to deal with matters of forests and wildlife and had recently banned iron ore mining in Bellary, Karnataka, one among a host of far-reaching orders related to the environment. No reasons were given for disbanding the bench, a move legal experts said was inexplicable. The bench has, however, not...

-The Hindu Auction alone cannot be insisted upon for disposal of all types of natural resources, Attorney General (AG) G.E. Vahanvati asserted in the Supreme Court on Thursday. Such an approach mandated in the 2G judgment, apart from being impractical in certain situations, can be counter-productive and can impact planned and coordinated growth and economy of the country, the AG told a five-judge Constitution Bench comprising Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices...

-The Hindu ‘Law declared insofar as spectrum cannot be extended to other natural resources’   The far-reaching nature of implementing the 2G judgment insofar as it was extended to auctioning of all natural resources (other than spectrum) would have a huge impact on Foreign Direct Investment and other investments in this country, argued Attorney General G.E. Vahanvati in the Supreme Court on Thursday. Justifying the Presidential Reference and the need for an advisory opinion...

-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 Governor M.K. Narayanan today said he was given “legal advice” that the Singur bill did not require presidential assent — an observation the government has seized upon in its search for a scapegoat. Absence of presidential assent was one of the key reasons cited by a Calcutta High Court division bench last week to strike down the Singur law. The state government today spoke of looking at “other alternatives” alongside...