The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) will have powers to investigate and prosecute corporate entities under the Companies Bill, 2011, expected to be cleared by the Union Cabinet before Diwali.  The bill also envisages rotation of company auditors for higher accountability, corporate social responsibility, a more effective regulation of related party transactions and stricter provisions to prevent siphoning of funds through subsidiary and associate companies.  The government expects the bill to modernise,...

-The Economic Times   If food inflation seems to be pinching more, it is because vegetable prices barely decline in winters, milk rises through the year and egg prices remain high in summers - all because of rising demand.  Over the years, the seasonal variation in prices has dropped and consumers do not have the option of shifting to cheaper produce to keep daily costs down, says a recent Reserve Bank of India...

AS THE UPA government struggled to hide its embarrassment over the Finance ministry note on the 2G spectrum allocation, the RTI Act — through which the note was made public — has become the whipping boy. Senior Cabinet members such as Corporate Affairs Minister Veerappa Moily and Law Minister Salman Khurshid have hit out at the ‘misuse’ of the transparency law. Moily called for a national debate as he claimed RTI...

IT IS one of the inspirational legends of Indian journalism that James Hickey, founder and editor of the Bengal Gazette — this country’s first newspaper, with its first edition going back to January 1780 — was a fearless seeker of the truth, taken to court and imprisoned by Warren Hastings, then governor-general. Reality is a little different. Hickey’s paper was often a gossipy, yellow rag. It thought nothing of publishing scurrilous...

The Centre is likely to raise remuneration under its rural job guarantee scheme and align it with the notified minimum wages of states following a court order last month.  Millions of workers enrolled under the government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) are entitled . 100 a day for a minimum of 100 days of work in a year. Despite the wage now being linked to the consumer price...