-Live Mint Maruti Suzuki India Ltd’s Manesar plant was witness to prolonged labour strife last year, but the violence unleashed on Wednesday that led to one person being killed caught its victims completely unawares. “Some of us jumped off the first floor to save our lives as we saw a mob of workers, hundreds of them, rushing towards us,” one of the injured Maruti officials told reporters at a hospital in Gurgaon...

-The Economic Times It was in the mid-eighties that former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi said if the Centre released a rupee for the poor, only 15 paisa reached them. Decades later, not much has changed. With leakages, delays, and uneven implementation of welfare schemes like NREGA, blunting benefits to the poor, the rural development ministry is proposing to put in place a system to assess the effectiveness of the schemes even...

-The Times of India Groundwater, a precious natural resource, is for all practical purposes a private property in India. Anyone can bore and extract water from the land he owns with few rules to restrict over-exploitation. But all this could soon change. Plans are afoot to alter laws and regulations to make groundwater a common property resource to ensure better regulation by government as a public trustee with the involvement of communities...

-The Times of India JAMSHEDPUR: The stand-off between the tribal people of Nagri village and the state government over acquisition of land for construction of educational institution is to reach the President of India with JharkhandPeople's Party (JPP) calling for a March to Delhi on July 22. Former legislator and founder president of the JPP Surya Singh Besra has announced to lead a delegation to the national capital on July 22 to...

Model community forestry initiatives in Orissa are defying Forest Department efforts to control and exploit the region’s forests. ‘Heaven is a forest of miles and miles of Mohua trees / And hell is a forest of miles and miles of Mohua trees with a forest guard in it!’ Thus goes a song of the Muria Adivasis in the forests of Bastar in central India. Encapsulated in this simple expression, however, is...