The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence. As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China,...

Long before they gained Currency as the real-life counterparts of the Na'vis portrayed by Hollywood blockbuster "Avatar", the author of the Vedanta verdict — Justice S H Kapadia — had made clear about how he saw the Dongaria Kondhs, who are officially classified as "primitive tribal group". Kapadia, now chief justice of India, described this tribe from Orissa as a people "living on grass". His unflattering, almost dismissive description came...

Three men went missing in Indian-administered Kashmir in April. Nothing extraordinary about that, but some time later their bodies were discovered near the Line of Control (LoC), which separates Indian- and Pakistani-administered Kashmir - a fate which militants trying to cross the border often meet. But during investigations, the police discovered that the men had been killed in a staged gun battle in a frontier area. The probe also revealed that a senior...

Pressing ahead with their demand for amendment in the Hindu Marriage Act, the Sarv Khap Mahapanchayat on Sunday resolved to slap a token fine of "ek aana" (Currency unit formerly used in India) on MPs and MLAs if they failed to meet its demand by June 19. In a meeting held in Jind, which was attended by around 2,000 representatives of khap panchayats, they also ruled out establishing any matrimonial...

As minister of statistics and programme implementation, Sriprakash Jaiswal should have the data to quantify how much money can buy. On Tuesday, making yet another pitch for increasing the annual local area fund for MPs, he said: “With prices soaring, Rs 5 crore — what we are seeking — would (be) equivalent to the Rs 2 crore given ten years ago.” His ire was directed at the Planning Commission for...