Implement land ceiling acts and enforce fifth and ninth schedule Radical left-wing resistance to the State has been festering in India since 1946, when the Communist Party of India began working in north Bengal and Telangana among landless scheduled castes and tribes who worked for a pittance in the lands of the upper-caste landowners in these areas. The root causes of this problem lie in the pernicious caste system of our...

Bengal is staring at the possibility of losing self-sufficiency in rice unless the state manages to reverse a declining trend and step up production by as much as 12 per cent over the next four years. Lack of self-sufficiency in grain production need not necessarily be an alarming factor for a modern economy. But such a status is looming over Bengal in spite of factories not mushrooming on farmland — the...

-The Hindustan Times In a first sign of dissent within the UPA government over the recent Rs. 7 hike in petrol prices, defence minister AK Antony on Tuesday said it was “not a correct step”. Antony's remarks came soon after he landed at Neyyattinkara in Kerala to campaign for Congress candidate R Selvaraj for the June 2 assembly by-elections. “The hike in petrol price was not a correct step. The oil companies should...

Health activists say new policy may not address the weaknesses in ongoing routine immunisation programmes and would flood poor countries with new vaccines When the global health leaders meet in Geneva from May 21 to 26 for the World Health Organization's 65th General Assembly, introducing new vaccines in the low- and middle-income countries would be high on their agenda. A “global draft vaccine action plan”, available on WHO's website, details the implementation...

On a day the Trinamool Congress celebrated the first anniversary of the announcement of the 2011 Assembly polls results, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat said here on Sunday that there has been an average of one farmer suicide every week since Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's government came to power in West Bengal.  “Up to 2011 in States like West Bengal and Kerala there was no news of...