-The Telegraph   Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh today opposed sharing of certain “privileged” and “secret” matters under the right to information (RTI) law, echoing cabinet colleagues Salman Khurshid and M. Veerappa Moily. “Ministers write to the Prime Minister on a variety of issues. There has to be a concept of secrecy in government,” Ramesh said. According to Ramesh, communications leading to a cabinet decision or a policy decision of the government should be...

-NDTV Profit   Some of India’s biggest and most-respected entrepreneurs have released an open letter to the government. The group which includes Wipro’s Azim Premji, Anu Aga of Thermax and HDFC's Deepak Parekh, refers to the anti-corruption Lokpal Bill that is meant to be introduced soon in Parliament. The industrialists write, “The Lokpal Bill is only one small but critical step in the national task of weeding out the plague of corruption...

People's activists want the Kudankulam nuclear power plant shut down completely; Tamil Nadu's politicians have the less ambitious aim of halting work on the project until the fears of local people are allayed. The plant was originally scheduled to begin operations later this month. The two groups submitted separate memoranda to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during their 40-minute meeting with him on Friday. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Srikumar Banerjee, National Security...

-The Indian Express   Taking a tough stand on rampant plagiarism in the preparation of Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) reports, the Environment Ministry has decided to scrap any project whose impact-assessment report is found to be a “copy-paste” job from other reports. EIA reports are a must to get mandatory ‘green clearances’ for projects. Project developers, which are mostly private firms, hire independent environmental consultants for the job. The decision to scrap such...

While imposing a ban on mining in Karnataka’s Bellary district in July this year, the Supreme Court had reasoned that the massive environmental damage caused by excessive mining impinges on the constitutional right to life. In neighbouring Goa, the latest state rocked by a mining scandal, the destruction could be on an even larger scale if one compares mining figures and relates these to the areas of the large district and...