-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Humble sand is today big business. The boom in the construction industry in the last decade has triggered a huge demand for sand, to meet which contractors, with the help of pliant state officials, have begun a dig-load-sell exercise at a frantic pace. The story of illegal loot of sand in this high-stake business is repeated in state after state. TOI spoke to several officials, activists,...
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The malnutrition bazaar-Kundan Pandey
-Down to Earth Is India ready to protect itself from the onslaught of food and nutrition industry? India is shouldering a huge burden of malnutrition-in the absence of government figures, a dipstick survey by non-profit HUNGaMA in 2012 suggests that 59 per cent of the country's children could have stunted growth and 42 per cent could be underweight. While the government is still struggling to tackle the problem, the food and nutrition...
More »Their Common Threads -Lola Nayar
-Outlook Growth vs development, Bhagwati vs Sen. Both are right, say experts. *** "Can I not talk about Bhagwati, please? I don't like talking about Bhagwati. He loves talking about me, I do not like talking about him." -Amartya Sen, Telegraph "You must ask Professor Sen, not me, why he will not engage in a debate with me.... After all, he is...
More »2G scam: JPC clears Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram; pins Rs 40,000 crore loss on NDA
-The Times of India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been given a clean chit by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on telecom which rubbished CAG's Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss calculations in the 2G scam but slammed the Vajpayee government for Rs 40,080 crore loss due to a policy shift in 1999. The committee - headed by Congress MP P C Chacko - in its draft report pinned the 2G blame on former...
More »Drilling holes in the Thirst Economy-P Sainath
-The Hindu As the borewells go deeper in Maharashtra, there have been worrying instances of ‘paleo-historic storages' being breached "Only two of them work," says Badri Kharat of his borewells in Roshangaon. That's hard - when you've sunk 36 of them spending millions of rupees, as he has. Kharat, a big landowner and local political personage, has been generous to his neighbours in this village of Jalna district. He pipes in drinking...
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