Even as railway minister Mamata Banerjee opposes government’s role in acquiring land for private companies , the contentious land acquisition (amendment) bill figures in the list of business for the winter session of Parliament beginning next week. The bill has been hanging fire in the wake of opposition from the Trinamool Congress leader, who recently skipped a meeting convened by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to evolve a consensus within the ruling...

With the aim of bringing transparency in work, Jan Mitra Nyas, a trust constituted by the NGO People’s Vigilance Committee for Human Rights (PVCHR), organised its social audit at a hotel in Jagatganj area in Varanasi on Wednesday. The trust presented all its balance sheets, account bill vouchers and progress reports, before the people from areas where the trust’s projects are being run, including both representatives of these programmes and...

The Rs 51,000-crore Posco steel project in Orissa, that has been delayed for five years, faces the prospect of getting delayed further. The ministry of tribal affairs is now looking at the possibility of whether the South Korean steel project, which also represents the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) in India so far, has actually encroached into the land owned by tribals. The Union ministry of environment and forest (MoEF) has...

It is imperative that the committee constituted to look into charges of corruption in the Commonwealth Games should also include violations of labour laws within its purview. One of the more blatant and visible scams of the recently concluded Commonwealth Games relates to how the thousands of workers who worked on the games construction sites were denied minimum wages, safety equipment, housing and other benefits constitutionally due to them. In an interview...

In reply to an RTI query filed by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) in August, the labour department of Delhi government has said that it does not have consolidated figures on the labour deaths reported during the Commonwealth Games  preparations. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) had separately filed an affidavit in the high court in September which said that 109 workers had died on its sites during...