In a significant move, the Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has declared that the “higher price” being offered by the Government of India to it for oil and gas exploration off Andhra Pradesh coast is “not market linked”, and it should get an even more, in keeping with market realities. The "revision", which the Government of India has still not formally announced, is from $4.2 per MMBtu (million British thermal units) to $8.4 MMBtu, which was challenged by several politicians, including Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal, who claimed it would mean a “windfall” of Rs 54,500 crore to the RIL.

Much against the huge claims of cent per cent enrollment, made year after year following Shala Praveshotsav and Kenya Kelavani programmes, usually carried out in early June, a new report, prepared under the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), Government of India, has suggested Gujarat’s poor showing in enrolling children in both primary and upper primary schools.

A just-released Planning Commission  study , “Evaluation Study of Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF)”, prepared by the top Government of India body’s Programme Evaluation Organization, has found that Gujarat has ranked poorly in the utilization of grants made available under the BRGF programme from the Government of India between 2006-07 and 2010-11. The study has found that, during the period under study, Gujarat ranked No 22nd in utilization of allocation made towards BRGF, and No 17th in utilization of the released grants among 27 states which receive the grants. Explaining BRGF, the study says, it is “an area development intervention that is aimed at promoting decentralized planning and development through a yearly untied development and capacity building grants to 250 backward districts across 27 states.” Gujarat’s districts covered for availing BRGF from the Government of India are – Dang, Dahod, Panchmahal, Banaskantha, Narmada and Sabarkantha. As many as 2,907 village panch...

Culling out gist from a plethora of sources available to you is indeed quite tricky. While I cannot speak for others (frankly, I lack competence to do it), journalists are made to do it almost on a daily basis. In doing so, at initial stages, they often falter, as they lack conceptual clarity as to what should be considered news. Of course, there are textbook definitions, but they cannot in any way help one to identify news from the huge flow of information available around. Journalists, especially of my generation, have never been trained into a formal school of communication, hence to them to answer this question academically is even more difficult. They have just “picked up” the skill. I asked a senior editor, “How do you identify what should be headline today?”, and his answer was simple, “Well, Rajiv, it comes from within, frankly, it just comes…” Often, whatever new you find from the available information is identified as news. It’s especially very easy when a big event takes pla...

  With the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), the powerful inter-state body working under the Government of India, having unanimously  decided  to raise the Narmada dam to the full reservoir level (FRL), 138.68 metres from 121.92 metres, a new apprehension is starting to grip the top Gujarat officialdom. Expressing the new fear, a senior official wondered, once the dam reaches its FRL, will the two neighbouring states, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, allow Gujarat to draw as much water as it wants for irrigation – at the expense of power being produced at the dam? Of would they raise objections, as they are more interested in power than irrigating Gujarat’s parched fields?

With Dr PK Misra, who was principal secretary to chief minister Narendra Modi during the 2002 riots, having  left  to Delhi as Prime Minister Modi’s additional principal secretary, Gujarat’s “industry-friendly” babus and small entrepreneurs are keeping their fingers crossed: What will happen to a whopping nearly 3,500 applications, said to be pending before the State-level Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA), which he had just come to chair after the post remained vacant for nearly a year?

New finance minister Arun Jaitley Will the Government of India’s new policy framework for budget adopt the “model” worked out by the Gujarat government under Narendra Modi, in which the richer states should walk away with a bigger slice of cake of the Central funds as compared to the poorer states? It would seem so, if one takes a closer look at one of the most crucial documents prepared by the Gujarat government late last year, but not made public because of reasons best known to the officialdom. Submitted to the Centre-appointed 14th Finance Commission, the document crucially calls for “an urgent need to include” a formula in devolution of Central funds which would “incentivize economic efficiency.”