The mask is off. Team Anna and his lieutenants are batting for the BJP On 30 October last year, when Mohan Bhagwat claimed that Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement was actually supported by the RSS, the remark conveyed palpable nervousness and attracted criticism from Team Anna. Three months later, as Team Anna launches its voters’ awareness campaign in UP, there is not even an attempt to keep its secular mask intact. The mask,...

Rural women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan produce a nutritious food supplement as take home rations for pregnant mothers and underfed infants   There is very little that distinguishes the hamlet of Madri from the innumerable others that dot southern Rajasthan. This is a region where the Aravallis make their presence felt in gnarled hillocks, where water is scarce and where the land yields its harvests grudgingly. People here, including toddlers, know well the edge...

Former plant director backs demands for compensation and jobs Agitating residents of villages in the vicinity of the Kaiga atomic power station have got support from unexpected quarters. The former project director of the plant, Paramahamsa Tewari, who helped to set up the installation in the early 1990s, has expressed support for the demands of the ‘struggle committee of villagers within five km of Kaiga plant,' whose protest at Karwar entered the...

SHEILA DEVI, 54, of Nangal Kalan village in Haryana’s Sonepat district cannot comprehend how Taneja Developers and Infrastructure Ltd (TDI) procured her two-acre plot in 2004, ‘signed’ with thumb impressions of her husband Narender Singh, who died in 2002 and his brother Bhupender, who went missing the next year. The documents are obviously forged. But how did a farmers’ family get cheated in Haryana, where the land acquisition policy formed in...

-The Economic Times   In 2007, 27-year-old Kaushalendra from Bihar shunned the placement frenzy, which would see many of his colleagues earn fat salaries, in favour of a more homespun alternative: Selling fresh vegetables on a push cart to residents of his hometown Nalanda.  Putting together whatever money he had, Kaushalendra began the venture in 2008 and soon started doing well. People didn't mind paying a little more if they saw value in...