-The Hindu Tapes suggest prosecutor, accused and star witness colluded to vitiate SC directions to CBI The exposure of an apparent conspiracy between the CBI prosecutor in the 2G scam investigation, A.K. Singh, and the accused Unitech Managing Director, Sanjay Chandra, could have grave consequences since it reveals a deliberate attempt to pull the wool over the Supreme Court’s eyes under whose supervision the entire investigation and prosecution has been occurring since...

-The Times of India The UPA-1's Rs 52,000 crore farm loan waiver scheme is turning out to be a big financial scandal. Out of 1 lakh farm loan waiver accounts audited in 700 bank branches across the country — involving disbursement of Rs 500 crore — about 30% of the waiver amount was allegedly found to have been siphoned off by a nexus of bank managers and microfinance institutions (MFIs). A comptroller...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...

-The Hindu Unless the government regulates the growth of the private sector and makes it accountable, the worn-down public health infrastructure cannot be revitalised The absence of a well thought out policy framework for strengthening the health system is the most important issue facing the health sector in India. In the government, there is no clarity on what the nation’s health system should be 10 years hence. Should it be a public...

-Economic and Political Weekly A cost-benefi t analysis by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy of the benefits from Aadhaar integration with seven schemes throws up huge benefi ts that are based almost entirely on unrealistic assumptions. Further, the report does not take into account alternative technologies that could achieve the same or similar savings, possibly at lower cost. Reetika Khera (reetika.khera@gmail.com) is at the Institute of Economic Growth on...