This wedding season, anxious grooms from Parsa and Ghatburra, two villages in Chhattisgarh's Surguja district, were offered financial assistance from an unlikely source. Adani Mining Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Ltd, was handing out loans to all those who could prove that the money would be spent on marriage arrangements. “A company official took us to the bank, opened accounts in our names, and gave us cheques for Rs....

In report submitted to the Supreme Court The Joint Expert Committee on ‘endosulfan,' in its report submitted to the Supreme Court, has said that the manufacturers have export orders for 1,734 mt of ‘endosulfan technical' and 292.5 kl of ‘formulation,' which can be allowed for export. The court, in its order on August 8, had asked the committee, under the Indian Council of Medical Research, to address the court on four issues...

-IANS   Goa's illegal mining scandal is worth Rs10,000 crore ($2 billion), former deputy chief minister of Goa and Congress legislator Dayanand Narvekar on Saturday told the Justice MB Shah commission probing the scam. Narvekar, who was a cabinet minister in Chief Minister Digambar Kamat's Congress-led government until a couple of years ago, also told Shah during a public hearing at the state secretariat that constant complaints in writing to the state chief...

Managing our soil and water resources in a sustainable and equitable manner needs a new political vision, which can be expressed through the proposed Land Acquisition Bill and the recently formed Global Soil Partnership. On the basis of a proposal I had made three years ago, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation at a multi-stakeholder conference, held...

The foreword — to the Draft National Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2011 — that says “urbanisation is inevitable” (I.p.1) signifies danger. The Bill, if enacted in its present form, is likely to worsen, and not stop, displacement of tribal, Dalit and other backward communities. The Bill states: “The issue of who acquires land is less important than the process of land acquisition, compensation for land acquired and...