Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, lacking sportsman’s spirit, has stuck to his post like Dendrite paste, despite a series of failures in combating secessionist insurgencies including the armed offensive led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). He parrots Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and considers Maoists to be “the most formidable challenge to governance.” “Only if villagers think that the real adversary is the Naxal who keeps them under threat will...

-The Indian Express Unfinished car shells rusting in a deserted factory in India's West Bengal state lie testimony to flaws in a century-old land-acquisition law the government now wants to replace. * Jobs, housing, cash to landowners made mandatory * Costs, project delays to increase - Indian corporates react * Bill to push up costs by 350 pct for big plots - analysts, cos * Bill likely to be passed in December Tata Motors was forced...

-PTI   Terming high global commodity prices a "grave threat", Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has called for developing countries to increase their investments in agriculture to improve crop productivity. "The recent commodity and food price rise and their volatility constitute a grave threat to economic growth and food security in our economies," Mukherjee said at a meeting of G-24 Finance Ministers here last evening. He took over as the new chairman of the group...

-The Economic Times   The Planning Commission's affidavit to the Supreme Court that anyone with a monthly expenditure of more than Rs 965 in urban areas and Rs 781 in rural areas would be deemed 'not poor' has been greeted with howls of indignation. Rightly so! Though both numbers - adjusted for inflation - are an improvement over the Tendulkar Committee's numbers of Rs 447 a month in rural areas and Rs...

-The Hindu   Cautioning against keeping “high-investment facilities” idle, the former Atomic Energy Commission chief, M. R. Srinivasan, has sought a vigorous public relations push to counter the “misinformation campaign” against the Kudankulam nuclear project. Noting that there is some amount of misunderstanding in the minds of the people protesting against the project after the Fukushima accident in Japan, he said, “Safety is not in anyway compromised.” “The Atomic Energy Department, Nuclear Power Corporation...