-NDTV   A board outside a temple for the Goddess Kali orders Dalits to stop at this point. "Harijans can pray from here," it declares. The warning sign was put up in August last year after three schoolgirls entered the shrine to offer Prasad to the Goddess, an icon of empowerment and Shakti. The caretaker of the temple in Orissa's Puri district offers no apologies for the discrimination. "It is against tradition,"...

Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow. Rage at persisting State injustice of coercive displacement frequently spills onto...

I must begin with two disclaimers. The Singur land development and rehabilitation bill, 2011 was moved in the West Bengal legislative assembly last Tuesday by the industries minister with whom I happen to share a name. However, I believe he does not share any of the opinions or sentiments expressed below. Second, I was a persistent critic of the Left Front government when it was in power and what I...

-The Telegraph Tata Motors has “abandoned” the Singur project, according to the draft of a state government bill that seeks to take over the entire land leased out to the company and prospective vendors. If the Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill, 2011, gets passed in the Assembly without any changes to the draft, it will be a matter of official record that the project has “in fact been abandoned by the...

West Bengal Industries Minister Nirupam Sen said here on Thursday that a unique comprehensive rehabilitation package for land-losers has been formulated and will be put in place in areas where industrial units are to come up. At an event where “letters of allotment” and “permissive possession certificates” were handed over to 13 investors for setting up units in south Bengal on a total of 1210.76 acres of land acquired by the...