-Outlook Corporate karza maafi reaches new heights, social spending new lows This year's budget write-off in customs duty on gold, diamonds and jewellery (all aam aadmi items, of course) is Rs 75,592 crore. That's well over twice the "record" amount allocated to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. As Prof Jayati Ghosh points out, the MNREGA has given billions of person-days of work to tens of millions of poor...

-Outlook India To the social subsidy whiners, please check corporate write-offs column The TV anchor asked eagerly of Arun Jaitley whether he would take hard decisions or, in the case of a bad drought, revert to loan waivers and (obviously wasteful) subsidies. The finance minister replied that it depended on the situation as it unfolded but he hoped he wouldn't have to return to such steps. "We hope so too," said...

-The Hindustan Times   Going by our Intelligence Bureau (IB) and some of the voices in the government, anyone asking for the protection of the country's forests, its rivers or its coasts is anti-national and destroying the country's economy. I have spent the better part of my life working to save India's natural wealth from the assault of development (largely in vain it often seems). I told successive governments that the hundreds of...

-The Hindustan Times Arvind Kejriwal may have been a champion of the Right to Information Act but his government seems bent on stonewalling requests for information on several key decisions taken by it. It's been more than a month since Dev Ashish Bhattacharya of Noida filed two applications under the transparency law. These have made the rounds of 22 departments - most of them with no connection to the subject matter -...

-The Indian Express The gangrape may have brought the tribal councils of this West Bengal district to notoriety, but it wasn't the first sexual abuse on their orders. What is more at play here though is growing outside interference in a region considered a vote bank, writes Madhuparna Das. On January 29 evening, 900 people of a village in Birbhum district's Labhpur block gathered near the hut of their headman. The hut,...