There will be no census exercise in several hundred villages in Chhattisgarh which have been rendered out of bounds for government officials by Naxalite groups. District administrations of Jagdalpur, Dantewada, Bijapur, Narayanpur and Kanker, all part of undivided Bastar which was once one of the largest districts in the country, have informed senior officials in Raipur that it will be difficult for them to carry out the census exercise — counting...

In an all-too-rare political consensus, India’s Central government and 10 states on Thursday decided to take a call in the following few weeks on reintroducing harsh laws that will severely punish hoarders in order to mitigate food inflation. A core committee comprising representatives of the states and the Centre, and led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appointed three sub-groups to come up with a solution within 45 days. One of the...

With food inflation still in double-digits, the first meeting of the Core Group of Central Ministers and State Chief Ministers on Prices of Essential Commodities is being held here on Thursday. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will preside. Ten Chief Ministers are expected to attend. The States that will be represented include Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Assam. Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee heads the group,...

The Centre has claimed that India’s Northeast has never been as peaceful this century as it has been since January 2009. The “peace”, however, appears to have flowed from the barrel of a gun. The last 15 months have witnessed the lowest number of civilian and security force casualties in the region since January 2000, according to Union home ministry data for six northeasern states (minus Mizoram) released today. At the same...

Potato farmers Madhusudan Mondal and Lakshman Adak, in their mid-50s, live 15km apart in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. Both have produced a bumper crop this year, but that has meant different things for Mondal and Adak. Mondal earned around Rs3.5 lakh selling 150 tonnes of potatoes to PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt. Ltd, having signed a contract with the maker of carbonated beverages and Frito-Lay chips to sell his produce to it...