-PTI Heavily dependent on the Centre for supply of electricity and facing acute power shortage, Bihar has taken steps for setting up 25 hydel power projects for generating about 800 MW with the proposals at various stages of approval, official sources said. Bihar State Hydel Power Coporation Limited Managing Director A K pandey told PTI that the state had at present 54 MW capacity hydel power plant and work was on at...

A Union finance ministry panel is likely to call Bengal’s top officials next week to discuss the request for a debt recast. This will be preceded by a meeting of a Trinamul Congress parliamentary delegation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. Bengal, Kerala and Punjab have been officially dubbed debt-stressed states. A panel headed by expenditure secretary Sumit Bose has been tasked to look into the problems of...

The Supreme Court in its verdict on the constitutionality of the Right to Education Act in relation to the reservation of seats for Economically Weaker Section [EWS] and socially disadvantaged [SD] children has rightly upheld the principle of integration. It is hard to see how it could have been any other way. In fact, the arguments against segregation and in favour of diversity in schools have long been settled in...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: It may be the impact of the efforts put in by officials led by panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee in the past few months, or a matter of outdoing the former Left Front government in terms of figures. But the fact is that the Mamata Banerjee government has spent a whopping Rs 982.86 crore in this March alone under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-The Telegraph An Indian pharmaceutical company has tweaked and tested a synthetic molecule first created in an American university and developed the world's latest drug against malaria, an alternative to standard anti-malarial therapy. India’s Ranbaxy Laboratories today launched the new drug for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, after nine years of research which was partly supported by the Indian government. Clinical trials in India, Tanzania, and Thailand...