In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...

-The Hindu   After the Jaitapur nuclear power project in Maharashtra, it is now the turn of the 2,000-MWe Kudankulam atomic plant in Tamil Nadu to run into serious opposition. As protests by local residents and activists intensified, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on Monday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to order the halting of the project until concerns and fears about the plant's safety were addressed. Hours later, Dr. Singh called up Ms....

Interview with social activist and Team Anna member Arvind Kejriwal. THE organisational abilities of Arvind Kejriwal exhibited during the recent Jan Lokpal Bill movement earned him the sobriquet “Field Marshal of a peaceful agitation”. The social activist and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner played a significant role in conceiving the slogans, the symbolism and the trajectory of the movement. He is credited with anticipating some of the moves of the government...

Anna Hazare's campaign may lead to a new Lokpal Bill, but it has legitimised middle-class vigilantism and other kinds of civil society mobilisation. NOW that Anna Hazare has declared victory, it is time to take stock of one of the most powerful recent mobilisations of people in India, focussed on influencing policy or lawmaking processes. The victory, however, is largely symbolic. The original demand of the movement, carefully built around Hazare's...

At a time when the Anna-tide has swept the people across the country against the anti-corruption campaign, sadly, the agrarian crisis continues to take a heavy toll on farmers in Vidarbha. Unable to put up with crop failure, crippling debts and not getting remunerative price for their produce, six more distressed cotton-growers have committed suicide in Vidarbha over the last 48 hours. Reports reaching Nagpur on Thursday said six cotton growers...