-Live Mint The current policy on compensating landowners could adversely affect character of India’s future growth The Parliament is currently considering a land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement Bill (LARR Bill), as are various state legislatures. These are likely to affect the pace and character of future growth in India in a significant way.  Setting up new industries, service establishments and real estate development will inevitably require land to be acquired from rural areas....

-The Economic Times New discoveries of natural resources in several African countries - including Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique - raise an important question: will these windfalls be a blessing that brings prosperity and hope, or a political and economic curse, as has been the case in so many countries? On average, resource-rich countries have done even more poorly than countries without resources. They have grown more slowly, and with greater inequality...

Two sets of government data on UPA government's most famous flagship programme Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), for which Rs. 33000 crore was earmarked in 2012-13 budget, provide widely different figures for several states, a feature which experts say is indicative of the corruption in the scheme and weakness of social audit or accountability. The government has increasingly relied on Management Information System (MIS) for monitoring NREGA at...

-The Hindustan Times Under the cover of endorsing a proposal for the National Food Security Bill framed by an independent group of development economists, the government is all set to empty the Bill of any substance. Provisions relating to the Public Distribution System (PDS) will be reduced to a pointless reshuffling of existing foodgrain allocations to state governments, that too in favour of the richer states. And other entitlements, relating for...

-The Hindustan Times Indian taxpayers may have lost as much as Rs. 3.8 lakh crore in scams in the power, aviation and coal sectors over the past eight years, the country's state auditor said in reports tabled before Parliament. The Comptroller and Auditor General charged the government with allotting coalfields and land for power projects and Delhi’s airport to private firms at a fraction of the market price, bringing the corruption issue...