-The Telegraph When the deadly gas was spreading havoc in Bhopal, Arjun Singh was hundreds of miles away — praying. Hours after the leaking methyl isocyanate gas had left a trail of death in the Madhya Pradesh capital, the state’s then chief minister had taken a flight to Allahabad, where he visited the chapel of his childhood school to pray for “moral courage”. The startling revelation comes in Arjun’s yet-to-be-released memoirs, A Grain...

Security forces will need to retool their strategy to ensure that innocent lives are not lost in anti-Maoist ops, reports Vicky Nanjappa  The killing of 19 persons alleged to be Maoists in Sarkeguda in Chhattisgarh on June 29 in a major operation by the Central Reserve Police Force has sparked off a major controversy, with villagers crying foul and calling the entire operation a fake one in which innocents were killed. According...

Punjab’s agricultural sector grew at 1.6 per cent during the 11th Plan against the national average of 3.41 per cent. The growth is tardy owing to near saturation in productivity. The rural debts in Punjab are estimated to be Rs 35,000 crore. The number of indebted rural households in Punjab is 66 per cent, third highest in the country after Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Government of India’s debt...

On Saturday, over 40 hours after the “biggest encounter” involving security forces and Maoists in Chhattisgarh, bodies of 19 alleged “hardcore Maoists and Jan Militia members” lay outside their huts in the three villages of Sarkeguda, Kottaguda and Rajpenta in Bijapur. Villagers alleged no government official had spoken to them or visited their homes, and no autopsies had been carried out on the bodies. Several bodies appeared to have been brutalised. This...

-The Indian Express If only committees moved this fast on issues other than censorship The six-member committee appointed by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal to examine the content of NCERT textbooks for “educationally inappropriate material” may have failed in its very purpose by delivering its report in just 45 days. After all, the institution of the committee was created as a procrastinatory tool to give governments some breathing room. Mostly, a committee is...