A tussle between the Chhattisgarh government and the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) over an elephant reserve has reached the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). And the dispute is emblematic of the way the richly forested state is hurtling to get the developed tag by shaving off its pristine tree cover. Since 2004, the Chhattisgarh government has signed 102 memorandum of understandings (MOUs) with industrial houses for production of steel,...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has appointed 14 members to the  National Advisory Council in consultation with its chair Sonia Gandhi, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) announced on Tuesday. The members of the high-profile NAC include eminent scientists, academics, intellectuals and civil society activists. While four members of the previous NAC -- Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze, N C Saxena and A K Shiva Kumar - have been renominated to the panel,...

Against the backdrop of allegations about under-utilisation of funds in the Northeast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today bemoaned this trend, while claiming that the current Union government has made allocations to the region like never before. “All I can say is that our government has increased very substantially the allocations for the development of infrastructure in the northeastern region. I think the amount of money that we have allocated has...

UPA-II leadership is seen struggling with both food act and the achievement of its ministers. Numbers don’t add up Political leadership of the Congress party will take a final call on the number of people eligible to receive subsidised food-grain under the proposed national food security law. While a preliminary report of the Suresh Tendulkar Committee puts the number at 372 million, the government’s official estimates say it is only...

Unimpressed by the progress made under the well-known KBK assistance plan, where over Rs 1,600 crore has been spent over the last decade, a concerned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked the Planning Commission to immediately carry out a fresh time-bound re-evaluation of the programme with special focus on the state of poverty and hunger. The Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput region of Orissa, which has over the years been divided...