KEY TRENDS   • Section 105 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which provides for excluding 13 Central legislation, including Land Acquisition (Mines) Act 1885, Atomic Energy Act, 1962, Railway Act 1989, National Highways Act 1956 and Metro Railways (Construction of Works) Act, 1978, from its purview, has been amended for payment of compensation with rigours $ • The amendments have now...

Dow Chemical, which bought the Bhopal disaster-tainted Union Carbide, will abandon a proposed research hub in Pune and return the land because of protests by an influential sect which fears pollution of a revered river. Dow India, an arm of the US giant, will return the 100 acres to the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), the state government entity yesterday told Bombay High Court where a suit against the project has...

A 32-year-old sharecropper hanged himself in Ausgram's Purbachati village on Wednesday morning, the third suicide in the drought-ridden region in less than two weeks. The news spread like wildfire through the scorched fields when, just 5km away, Trinamool Congress leaders Partha Chatterjee and Sisir Adhikary were consoling the families of the earlier two victims, Jitu Bagdi and Yunus Seikh. Gosai Patra quietly walked out of home at dawn and hanged...

A farmer committed suicide in Burdwan today, apparently driven by drought, debt and the anxiety of bringing up a daughter born four days ago. Gosain Patra, 32, is the third farmer from Burdwan’s Ausgram to have committed suicide this year. Gosain, a resident of Purbatotipara village, hanged himself from a tree this morning. The farmer’s family members said he had managed to cultivate only half of his two-and-a-half bigha land because of...

There’s suddenly a flurry of activity in Karotia, a nondescript village in West Bengal’s Burdwan district. Lately, a lot of politicians and state government officials have been visiting the village, and they say work on a nearly forgotten 14km irrigation canal is going to start soon. It’s been nearly 36 years since the state government first proposed to dig the canal, recalls Azizur Haque, the local panchayat chief. It was to...