-The Hindu The Centre claims to be fulfilling the Prime Minister’s plan for full rural electrification. But a close check of its own real-time data shows that the gap between official claims and ground reality is stark Haldu Khata, a village in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh, is one of the 7,008 villages that the government claims to have “electrified” in the last year, under the Modi government’s flagship scheme of rural...

-The Hindu Business Line Even as village after village in India is ‘electrified’, many households within them, equal to the US population, are not The Prime Minister in his Independence Day speech reaffirmed the goal of “power for all” and said 18,500 villages which still have no electricity would be electrified within the next 1,000 days. The goal of complete electrification was first stated by the Rajadhyaksha committee on power in 1978...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A joint parliamentary committee has favoured restoring most of the provisions of the UPA's 2013 land law into the land acquisition bill the Centre wants to pass, signalling a climb-down by the government. Sources said that even the BJP members on the 30-member panel had favoured scrapping the exemptions that the NDA's current bill provided from the social impact assessment (SIA) and consent provisions. This would not have been...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Even as a Joint Parliamentary Panel is looking into the controversial Land Bill, which seeks to replace the Land Act of 2013, the National Democratic Alliance is considering diluting the controversial consent clause and offering more clarity on compensation to farmers to make the piece of legislation more acceptable. A highly-placed source told BusinessLine that “an important element of the strategy is to get the report...

The tribal or the Scheduled Tribe communities constitute only 8.6 percent of India's population and yet, they are around 40 percent of those displaced due to ‘development’ projects. In the midst of a raging debate on the new Land Acquisition Ordinance, a new report brings out many such paradoxes of development versus displacement of India’s indigenous or Adivasi people. The report exposes the anomalies of land alienation, displacement and forced...