-The Telegraph Guwahati: All is not lost for Majuli, although the isLand on the Brahmaputra in Jorhat district has lost enough already. Experts today said there was no danger of the isLand disappearing from the face of the earth completely, as new Land masses were coming up. “It is true that the Brahmaputra has eroded a substantial portion of Majuli over the years, but historically, it is equally true that soil is getting...

-The Hindustan Times To maintain a fine balance between allies’ pressure and investors’ sentiments, the UPA government will let states decide their own limits on acquiring Land for private projects. In its ambitious Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011, the Centre has bypassed recommendations of a parliamentary panel and will give states the power to fix their own ceilings. The draft bill prepared by UPA-1 ran into a hurdle over the...

-The Telegraph Ranchi: Faced with an imminent Jharkhand High Court hearing on the progress made at Nagri where three premier educational institutes are coming up, a cornered state government has planned a desperate defence to counter allegations of mishandling the issue and escalating the battle of ownership of 227 acres. According to sources, the government will tell the court of a plan to set up police barracks at the construction sites of...

-The Times of India The attack on three environment and RTI activists across the country in less than two weeks has brought to the fore how environmentalism is a dirty and sometimes violent game in the hinterLand unlike the soft, candle-lighting tiger-loving green activism in big cities.  Akhil Gogoi in Assam, Bharat Jhunjhunwala in Uttarakhand and Ramesh Agrawal in Chhattisgarh - green activists who used RTI to their advantage - were attacked...

-The Telegraph The Centre has brought back quarterly monitoring of the performances of all ministries and projects after having let the practice lapse into half-yearly reviews about five years ago. Projects and ministries will be set targets and these will be reviewed at three levels — by the PMO, Planning Commission and administrative ministries — plan panel deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said today. “We have set quarterly targets for all the ministries...