11 of its source mines did not have a valid clearance One week after Vedanta Aluminium's application to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa was rejected, its refinery expansion project has been slapped with a show-cause notice by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests. The company was taken to task for allegedly going ahead with a six-fold expansion of its refinery in Lanjigarh even as the Ministry was still...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent assurance that the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 would be amended is welcome though delayed. There are many compelling reasons why this inept and outdated Act should be changed and the farmers' protest over disruptive acquisition in Uttar Pradesh is only one of them. The 1894 Act, last amended in 1984, has not helped balance the land needs of rapid economic growth and the grievances...

To make the domestic coconut industry globally competitive, the Coconut Development Board has decided to impart technological training to farmers, processors, traders and exporters. To facilitate this, Union Minister of State for Agriculture K.V. Thomas will lay the foundation stone for a ‘farmers block' at the board's headquarters in Kochi on Septem ber 2, which is being observed as the World Coconut Day. The venue would serve as a centre for...

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...

The syllabus for the three-year course for rural medical practitioners is ready. It promises to do away with what's "unnecessary" in the four-and-a-half-year MBBS course and prepare "hands-on" doctors at the primary level. The course, called the Bachelor of Rural Health Care (BRHC), is expected to change the landscape of medical education and delivery of health care and hopefully, solve the shortage of doctors in rural areas, home to 70%...