At a time when other countries are cutting down ethanol admixing with vehicular fuel due to tightening supplies of alcohol, India, oddly enough, is doing the reverse. The Union government has forced the states to raise ethanol doping of petrol from 5 per cent to 10 per cent immediately and has set the target of hiking it further to 20 per cent by 2017, least realising that the sugar industry,...

Kabul (Reuters): Dozens of Indian labourers have been forced to take refuge in a Sikh temple in Kabul after job agents who promised lucrative jobs in the unstable capital disappeared, leaving the men penniless and without passports. Billions of dollars in western military contracts have turned Afghanistan — long a source of refugees fleeing chronic conflict — into an unlikely magnet for migrant workers willing to risk their lives for a...

A working group appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has recommended “autonomy to the extent possible” for Jammu and Kashmir. “The question of autonomy and its demand can be examined in the light of the Kashmir accord or in some other manner or on the basis of some other formula as the present Prime Minister may deem fit and appropriate so as to restore the autonomy to the extent possible,” the...

While the government may have got reprieve with the fair and remunerative price, the mills are expected to move the courts On October 21, the Central government came out with an ordinance that it will henceforth announce a fair and remunerative price for sugarcane, instead of the statutory minimum price. Millions of farmers across the country grow sugarcane which they sell to sugar mills. To make sure that prices don’t tank...

Empty protest no substitute for rational framework In a voluminous 300-page report, a committee on agrarian relations and land reforms, headed by the Union rural development minister, has found fault with practically every aspect of land policy in India, attributing the rise of Naxalism, tribal and agrarian unrest entirely to this. However, despite its composition of a mix of officials, experts and activists, the committee has failed to come up with...