-The Hindu The draft law on acquisition strikes a balance between development and justice for those who will be displaced in the process India is a rapidly industrialising economy and society with intense demands for better infrastructure from its people. The last 20 years have seen a great acceleration in this process, with India becoming one of the world’s fastest growing economies. However, for those whose lands were acquired for these purposes...

-IPS News World Water Week recently concluded in Stockholm with a special emphasis on the linkages between water and food security. From the worst drought in 56 years in the United States Midwest, to the Karnataka’s drought in India, to the protracted drought in the Sahel region of West Africa, we have also seen how in our globalised world the nexus between lack of water and food security in one corner of...

-The Telegraph In the desert-like barrenness of brown around him, Suresh Mangsuli is growing grapes. As the rest of his drought-hit village thirsts for drinking water, he splashes his three acres of vines with over 10,000 litres a day. His huge farm pond is brimming, insured against seepage by a black polythene sheet stretched across its floor. Its water is pumped out to irrigate the vineyard through a network of drip pipes. Growing grapes...

-PTI The Haryana Government has formulated a rural water policy for the state for the year 2012 in order to save precious drinking water by preventing wastage due to unmetered connections and open taps. A spokesman of the Public Health Engineering Department said that this policy has been formulated keeping in view the present scenario of wastage of water through unmetered connections provided to consumers in rural areas, which are being billed...

-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...