-Live Mint/ Bloomberg Conflicts between industry and farmers getting worse as water becomes more and more scarce Sachin Ingale slipped out of his family's two-room, white-painted mud hut about 4pm and walked into their farm field where the 22-year-old took a deep swig of pesticide from a plastic bottle. He died later that evening. Four months later, the mercury is pushing 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in his village in...

-Live Mint Electoral reforms are not the forte of law ministers. But they can avoid damaging a battered system The resignation of Ashwani Kumar as law minister has brought cheer to a group of people who do not have much to do, at least directly, with the coal block allocation controversy. These are people working on electoral reforms. This is because ever since becoming law minister, Kumar had been consistent in his...

-The Times of India In English Vinglish, her big comeback movie last year, Sridevi's Shashi Godbole was a small-scale caterer in Pune before the movie's arc took her to the US. We saw her efficiency at making boondi laddoos, we saw that her clients loved them and we know she made a little money from it. But we also saw how little her enterprise mattered to her family, and that her...

-Countercurrents.org   The events of last over two decades have shown us, more than before that the efforts of dividing the nation by communal forces have been a major obstacle to social peace and process of development. In India while the communal violence began with the Jabalpur riot of 1961, it is from last couple of decades especially from 1980s that the divisive politics has tried to drive a wedge between different...

-The Economic Times Three weeks ago, when the Supreme Court reopened the iron-ore mining door some more in Karnataka, miners in Orissa breathed a Rs 50,000 crore sigh of relief. Also in the dock for some offences of a similar nature, Orissa's iron-ore miners, who produce a third of this mineral that is critical to steel, had been dreading their fate, which lay in the hands of a Central government panel. The...