-ENS Economic Bureau At a time when companies such as Kingfisher Airlines and Suzlon Energy have defaulted on bank loans, finance minister P Chidambaram on Tuesday made a strong pitch for individual borrowers with low income, asking banks and financial institutions to not hesitate in giving loans to them. “The poor in India are not bad borrowers. The poor in India are not dishonest borrowers. The poor in India are ethical, honest...

-The Times of India SHIMLA: Former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh's interest in buying LIC policies bear an interesting pattern over the past 10 years. These policies are at the heart of a controversy with allegations of Money laundering levelled against him by the BJP. Before the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the 78-year-old state Congress chief had only two LIC policies for himself, each with a premium barely one-hundredth of that...

-The Times of India Everyone agrees that India needs to deliver social protection to the aam admi; the forthcoming Food Security Bill is one such attempt. Everyone also agrees that the government service delivery pipelines are riddled with leakages and largescale corruption. Direct cash transfers have been proposed as a way to remedy this defective system. However, as could be expected, the debate has become polarised, with one side believing that cash...

-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: Hours before he was removed from the land consolidation department, Haryana's whistleblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka had framed a few novel rules to put an end to fraudulent benami land deals in the state. In his last-ditch effort to rein in land sharks, Khemka, the then inspector general of registration, on October 10, made the Aadhaar number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India mandatory for...

-The Times of India The questions over the source of funds to Nitin Gadkari's Purti Power and Sugar Ltd have deepened, with investigations revealing that Money flowed in from a multi-layered maze of companies registered all over India. A TOI report on Tuesday had mentioned some two dozen companies, many with unverifiable addresses, whose directors included Gadkari's driver and astrologer. A closer look at the documents filed with the Registrar of Companies reveals...