-The Times of India Rains could bring some relief to the UPA in the pre-election year with the meteorological department on Friday projecting a countrywide normal monsoon for 2013. The forecast should allay government's fears of food inflation jumping again over the 10% mark after being only partially tamed in the last quarter of the financial year. The weather office said that rainfall would be within the normal range - 98% of...

-The Hindu Business Line There can be no denying the need for a legal framework to ensure that the likes of Saradha do not take the entire financial system for a ride. But that said, there will always be greedy investors, willing to be taken in by the tall promises of unscrupulous operators. The latter's task is made easier by loopholes in the law. Hence, Ponzi operators used the legal loopholes...

-Bloomberg The entire land could be handed over by June to Posco, which already has about 1,700 acres in its possession Mumbai: Orissa expects to complete procuring land needed forPosco's steel complex in less than two weeks as farmers relinquish their opposition on the proposed $12 billion project. About 200 acres (81 hectares) out of the total 2,700 acres are left to be acquired from local residents, said Satya Kumar Mallick, the administrative...

-The Hindustan Times The sorry plight of thousands of small savers duped by a deposit-collecting firm in West Bengal is, perhaps, symptomatic of a wider malaise that runs deep in the Indian economy. What if a company asked you to invest Rs. 200,000 and promised to give you Rs. 8,000 a month for five years and a swanky sedan at the end of the fifth year? What if a company asked...

-Live Mint The experience of Kerala and Tripura shows how panchayati raj can help in the empowerment of women Chulubari (Tripura)/Kanjikuzhy (Kerala): Her relatives warned Hena Das, a resident of Chulubari in Tripura, against taking up political office because it wasn't "meant for women". Das disregarded the warnings. Two years on, she has no regrets. She also has no male colleagues; her fellow representatives on the board of an 12-member panchayat are all...