On the night of June 21,  around 10 p.m., the police of West Bengal’s Hooghly district descended on Tata Motors’ half-built Singur plant and threw out the private guards there. In about half an hour, the new government in West Bengal, under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, took over the 997 acres that had proved to be the Waterloo of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and its allies.   Earlier,...

An uneasy calm prevailed in the troubled Nuagaon panchayat in the proposed Posco project site today as the district administration, different village forest committees and irate villagers reassessed the situation after yesterday’s police action during the felling of trees in the area. The police had resorted to lathicharge yesterday on the members of Sanghaipai Mathsahi village forest committee and land losers at Polang while they were opposing the cutting down of...

The communal violence bill prepared by the National Advisory Council (NAC) seeks fundamentally to change how the government deals with violence against minorities. The bill focuses on religious and linguistic minorities as well the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, but religious minorities are at its heart. The bill has some undeniable strengths, but it suffers from two analytically fatal flaws. First, it places excessive faith in the state machinery. Though...

The Delhi Jal Board, MCD, NDMC and other such agencies will have to ensure minimum safety and health standard for sewerage and other unorganised workers by giving them free medical treatment, thanks to a Supreme Court verdict. Families of workers employed by civic agencies such as the Delhi Jal Board and Municipal Corporation of Delhi will henceforth be entitled to immediate ex-gratia payment of Rs 1 lakh. A bench of justices GS...

In contrast to the 1990s, when age-old matters of identity drove electoral politics, it appears that development-related issues such as land acquisition and law and order will play a critical role in the contentious campaign for the UP elections due next year. While this can be attributed to the BSP’s “sarvajan” agenda, it also signals the impact of the market economy and the need to attract private investment, which has...