-The Business Standard   Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee explained the government’s helplessness over inflation in the Rajya Sabha with great eloquence on Thursday. Much of what he said may have solid economic fundamentals, but the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government cannot claim helplessness forever — not when the signs of the cracks it is creating in India’s rural prosperity are becoming so obvious. If any one thing that has protected the Indian...

-The Hindu   All measures have been taken to maintain the safe mode of critical systems with skeletal staff at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in spite of work coming to a halt at the project site following protests, S.S. Bajaj, Chairman, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), said on Thursday. Interacting with the media on the sidelines of the 43rd annual conference of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (India), Dr. Bajaj said that...

U.P.'s GDP grew at 7.28 per cent in the past five years, but the State ranks low in virtually every area of socio-economic development. IF statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) are the only criteria to evaluate the performance of a government, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh will have to be rated as one with highly impressive credentials. For, India's most populous State has recorded a...

-The Hindu   Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...

-Express News Service   The parliamentary panel studying the Lokpal bill has recommended “appropriate representation” for the weaker sections in the search committee.   The standing committee on law and justice has, however, maintained that the choice of the ombudsman “has to achieve the selection of the best and the brightest at the entry point”. The committee, which adopted its final report this evening, has suggested that the search panel must include “CERTain sections of...