-PTI   CPI has refused to answer a questionnaire on provisions of Lokpal Bill sent by the government, saying it will state their views and suggestions during the discussion on the issue in Parliament. In a letter to joint Lokpal Bill drafting committee chairman and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, party general secretary A B Bardhan said at no stage were the political parties involved or ever consulted during the entire process of...

Like millions of others across India, I have spent the past week repelled by the spectacle of a weak government entering into improbable contortions over the naive and somewhat bizarre demands of Baba Ramdev. And when the “toughness” followed in the early hours of Sunday, it came in a typically cowardly fashion — with police action in the dead of the night against unarmed supporters who did not pose an...

-The Economic Times   The single most significant achievement of the government's midnight crackdown on Baba Ramdev and his fellow protesters at Delhi's Ramlila Grounds has been to dent its own credibility. Its critics are entirely right to ask why, if the fasting Baba is a charlatan as the government now claims he is, more ministers were sent to receive him at the Delhi airport than has been assigned to greet...

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it,' quipped Charles F Kettering , the famous American engineer and inventor of the electric starter. Well, the government has done just that! It has appointed an eight-member committee to examine ways to tackle black money. Perhaps that is too cynical! After all, the flurry of activity (the committee is only one of a series...

Brushing aside protests from a section of landowners, a determined district administration today stepped up its land acquisition drive in Gadakujang and Nuagaon gram panchayats. Simultaneously, the authorities also worked out strategies for taking up the drive in the Dhinkia gram panchayat, the nerve-centre of anti-Posco movement. “The land acquisition process was peaceful barring a few cases where people expressed unwillingness but we managed to prevail over them,” said special land acquisition...