For 25 years, residents of Tajnagar village near Gurgaon lobbied for a railway station in their village. When their demand was not met, the villagers decided to take matters in their own hands — they pooled in Rs 21 lakh and built a railway station on their own. On Tuesday, the result of their efforts — perhaps the first railway station in the country on which the railways didn’t have...
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7 months on, UPA-2 flagship schemes fail to impress by Rajeev Deshpande
Seven months into its second innings in power, UPA-2’s report card on key target schemes is just about average. Initiatives like Rajiv Awas Yojana are yet to be fully formulated while some others like the western dedicated rail corridor are stalled and a few other schemes are suffering from end-user glitches. A year-end review of flagship programmes, now scanned by PMO’s delivery monitoring unit apart from Cabinet Secretariat, has highlighted...
More »Indian migrants face bleak future in Dubai
The impact of the global financial downturn has been felt keenly in the Middle Eastern emirate of Dubai - and that in turn is affecting the remote Indian village of Akhopur in the state of Bihar, from where Amarnath Tewary reports. In August 2008, Bharat Bhushan Tiwari - from Akhopur village in eastern Indian Bihar - took a loan of 71,000 rupees ($1,500) from a village moneylender to pay a...
More »Social Banditry by Ramachandra Guha
The novelist and critic, C.S. Lewis, said he had no time for those who thought that since they had read a book once, they had no need to read it again. The great works of literature were to read again and again. The urge to go back to a book was prompted sometimes by aesthetics, the desire to savour once more its artful or elegant prose; and, at other times,...
More »‘Mamata’s proposal to set up railway project at Singur is welcome’ by Marcus Dam
Welcoming the proposal by the railways for setting up a coach manufacturing unit on the land that was earlier acquired by the State government for Tata Motors’s small car project which was subsequently relocated from Singur, the State’s Industries Minister, Nirupam Sen told the West Bengal Assembly here on Wednesday that it was one case with a hope of achieving consensus in the State on setting up industry. According to...
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