Suggests Rs. 200-crore plan to win villagers over to Kudankulam Even as a committee constituted by the Centre to address fears about the safety of the Kudankulam nuclear power project was set to meet an experts panel of the Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday, the former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, has recommended a massive Rs. 200-crore special development plan for villages around the project site. The 15-member central panel, consisting of experts...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Special powers to act and evade by Muzamil Jaleel
When Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act from certain areas areas in Jammu and Kashmir, it was a political move with many objectives. The government, however, had to put the plan on hold. Though the Home Ministry has been in favour of a withdrawal, the plan came under severe criticism from the Army, which argued that a withdrawal, even if partial, would hamper...
More »Massive Digital Divide in the Land of IT by Sujoy Dhar
In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet. But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...
More »Dantewada's dilemma by Smita Gupta
The tribal people of Chhattisgarh are in an extremely dangerous situation, caught as they are between the state forces and the Maoists. THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Soni Sori, an Adivasi schoolteacher from Chhattisgarh, was arrested in Delhi on October 4 on charges of acting as a conduit between the Essar group and the Maoists, the former accused of giving “protection money” to the latter. On October 7, she moved the Delhi High Court to...
More »Saranda: den to showpiece by Basant Kumar Mohanty
As many as 56 villages in the Saranda forests, freed from over 10 years of Maoist dominance in a month-long offensive in August, is set to see a new era of development with the Centre planning to showcase it as a test case to prove that police action is no impediment to building social infrastructure. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who visited the Jharkhand capital last week, has sent a...
More »