-Frontline After the year-long Jansamvad Yatra and Jansatyagraha, the Ekta Parishad has a written commitment from the Rural Development Ministry to advance land reforms.  Celebration and caution. These sentiments dominated the deliberations of senior activists of the Ekta Parishad as they gathered at Delhi’s Gandhi Peace Foundation office on October 18, one week after the organisation and the Union government had signed a 10-point agreement to advance land reforms. The agreement had...

-IPS News Environmental activists are cautiously optimistic that a call by a court-appointed technical committee for a ten-year moratorium on open field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops will shelve plans to introduce bio-engineered foods in this largely agricultural country. “We are now waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will accept the recommendations of its own committee at the next hearing on Oct. 29,” said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Forum...

-Outlook A green NGO today alleged that the Environment Ministry has given its nod to divert the Mahan forests in Madhya Pradesh for a coal block and described the decision as "appalling". Greenpeace India campaigner Priya Pillai alleged that the Environment Ministry's decision to grant forest clearance to the Mahan coal block in Singrauli district is "appalling". "The communities living in the forest have written more than once to the Ministry on the...

-The Times of India INDORE: Thousands of passengers on the Delhi-Mumbai trunk route are risking their lives daily by travelling on trains barrelling down the 120-year-old Bhairavgarh bridge in Ratlam, declared "distressed" eight years ago. Railway engineers had certified the bridge unsafe in 2003-04 and sought immediate repairs for it to sustain the pressure of the 50-odd trains pounding down every day, including the Rajdhani, August Kranti, Golden Temple, Duronto, and Sampark...

-The Hindustan Times Indira Gandhi National Open University, India’s largest distance learning varsity, allowed over a dozen private firms to offer its degrees and diplomas, violating rules and costing the public exchequer over Rs. 300 crores. The CBI is set to probe a series of MoUs signed by IGNOU under its former Vice Chancellor VN Rajasekharan Pillai with private firms that earned crores offering IGNOU degrees between 2006 and 2011, agency sources said.   Pillai,...