An Indian government panel has recommended that environmental clearances for a steel plant to be built by South Korean company Posco be scrapped. The $12bn plant in Orissa is India's largest foreign investment project. Critics of the project say it will exhaust iron ore deposits in 20 years. India earlier rejected plans by mining giant Vedanta to extract bauxite in eastern Orissa state saying it would damage the local environment. A panel of India's...

The four-member review committee on Posco  will submit its report to the environment and forests ministry on Monday but it has already got mired in controversy with the chair of the panel, ex-environment secretary Meena Gupta, expected to give a dissent note while the other members provide a unanimous majority version. The fact that the chair of the committee was the senior-most bureaucrat in MoEF when environmental clearance was given to...

The fate of South Korean steel giant Posco’s project in Orissa will be decided by early November. The decision will be taken before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh travels to Seoul for the G-20 meet in the second week of November. The environment ministry-appointed committee headed by former environment secretary Meena Gupta will submit its report on October 18. Sources said that there are indications that the panel will not be submitting...

When the revenue departments sleep over cases they had lost in the courts and do not appeal for long, it is difficult to tell whether it is just red tape or something else. Their lethargy causes losses to the government and gains to tax dodgers. The new chief justice of India (CJI) started his stint in the Supreme Court a few months ago with a strict code for the indolent babus....

In a first step of its kind, nine private companies have been shortlisted by the Union rural development ministry to develop infrastructure in the rural areas and maintain it for a period of 10 years. The project, envisioned as part of former President A P J Abdul Kalam’s pet scheme, Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA), will see these nine private players undertaking pilot projects in January next year...