-Live Mint Farmers resisting India's biggest FDI deal are paying a heavy price for their stand In June 2005, the Orissa government signed the country's biggest foreign direct investment deal yet with the South Korean steel manufacturer Posco for a $12 billion (around `65,856 crore) plant near Paradip in the mineral-rich state. Livelihoods in eight existing agricultural and fishing villages were to give way for the project that was intended to be...

-The Hindu Haryana's Sonia, daughter of Relu Ram Punia, former Haryana MLA, might become the first woman in India's history to be hanged as President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected her mercy petition. Government sources say the President has also rejected mercy petitions of at least six other death convicts. Sonia was convicted along with her husband Sanjeev in 2007 of killing eight members of her family, including her father, over a property dispute...

-The Indian Express Amritsar: Hours before it was due to open in theatres Friday, the Punjab government banned a controversial Punjabi film, Sadda Haq, which focuses on the era of militancy in the state, and attributed the decision to the need to maintain communal harmony. But the move has stoked a fresh controversy with the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which is controlled by the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal and had helped the...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-The Hindu But both police and Tritiya Prastuti Committee deny claim Kunda (Jharkhand): All through Monday and Tuesday, cadres of the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC), a splinter group of the banned CPI (Maoist), in the Sarengdah and Kunda panchayats in Chatra district kept track of what their leaders decided to do with the 25 Maoists taken hostage four days ago. In the March 29 attack, the TPC also killed 10 Maoists after...