If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

Education reforms, that were expected to be ushered in Karnataka’s schools following the landmark Right to Education (RTE) legislation, will have to wait. It has emerged that financial and procedural delays will push implementation of key provisions of the Act to next year. The deadlock over funding and delay in preparation of rules for the implementation of the RTE Act means that 25 pc quota in schools for students from disadvantaged...

Over two years after the issue rocked the state, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today again raised the issue of returning land to “unwilling” Singur farmers. The issue had compelled Ratan Tata to pull out from West Bengal with the ambitious Nano project. Referring to his September 2008 meeting at Raj Bhawan with Mamata Banerjee, the CM said, he is still ready to return 100 acres of land to the unwilling farmers and...

Prof M.S. Swaminathan, the father of Green Revolution and Chairman of National Commission on Farmers (NCF) that called for revamp of policies to revitalise agriculture, says agricultural sector in India is entering a state of serious crisis. Quoting figures from National Sample Survey Organisation, he says half of the farmers in the country want to quit farming. Prof Swaminathan, who was here to deliver the Convocation Address at the Acharya N.G....

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...