The Morning Wrap: India To Speed Past China In 2016; Manmohan Singh Quizzed By CBI

The Morning Wrap is Huffpost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.

Main News

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that it expects growth in India to outpace China's by 2016, setting of a massive rally in India's stock markets. However the report suggests that India's projected edge rests more on growing structural weaknesses in the Chinese economy rather than a massive improvement in India's.

The government plans to tax your phone and internet bills to fund its much-publicized Swachh Bharat drive. However the telecom industry doesn't appear enthused and even the legality of such a plan isn't yet apparent.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has been quizzed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with the coal scam case, relating to allocation of the Talabira II block to Hindalco. Singh, at that time, also held the portfolio of coal and the interrogation was in pursuance of orders of a special CBI court.

The Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), headed by 26/11 accused, Hafiz Saeed, will hold a massive public rally in Karachi, during US President Barack Obama weekend visit to New Delhi. The US had previously asked Pakistan to ensure no terror incidents occur during the visit to which Pakistan only said it will "watch" groups such as the JuD.

India has improved its tiger count by 30% to 2,226 since 2010, according to a valuation independent of the government. India's environment minister credited the numbers to sustained conservation efforts, because of which India now accounts for 70% of the world's tigers.

Twitter Inc. on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Bengaluru-based mobile marketing and analytics company ZipDial Mobile Solutions Pvt. Ltd, its first acquisition in India. This is aimed at expanding Twitter's user base in the country as well as pave the way for the micro-blogging site's first engineering office in India.

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday ordered the government to unfreeze Greenpeace India's bank accounts, through which it had received Rs 1.87 crore of foreign funds from Greenpeace International. The court observed that the government had not brought any "evidence on record" to support its action of freezing the account. The move is an indictment of the government's move to deplane a Greenpeace activist last week.

The Indian Express reports that Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has asked RAW, the country's premier foreign intelligence agency, to investigate collusion between Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) lawyers and the umpire in the arbitration tribunal that's adjudicating, since 2011, in a dispute over costs related to Panna, Mukta and Tapti (PMT) oil and gas fields.

Off The Front Page

The European Union has lifted a ban on the import of Alphonso mangoes from India. The embargo which had hit producers from Ratnagiri in Maharashtra came into force after plant pests were found in consignments and because of "unresolved deficiencies" identified by the EU's Food and Veterinary Office.

Better pay your credit card bills on time as it could hurt your job prospects. According to the Business Standard, banks such as IndusInd Bank, foreign lenders DBS Bank and Standard Chartered have begun checking the Cibil scores--a credit ratings service-- of applicants as part of their pre-employment screening process.

Former Indian captain and spin great, Anil Kumble's company has identified a physically-challenged boy from Karnataka with a marked talent for spin bowling.

To express disgruntlement over not been given an election ticket, an engineer involved with managing some of the Congress party's websites shut down the party's Delhi website and the online portal of the party's national mouthpiece Sandesh.

13-year-old Indian-origin Shubham Banerjee may have become the youngest entrepreneur to bag venture-capital funding from Intel Corp for his company Braigo Labs, that aims to develop low-cost machines to print in Braille.

Opinion

Sheel Kant Sharma in the Indian Express laments that India hasn't moved fast enough to maximize gains from international nuclear-energy partnerships signed nearly a decade ago.

Krishna Kumar in the Hindustan Times critiques the methods by which learning levels are tested by private NGOs and argues that the information collected isn't contributing to positive change.