The government is ready with a revised Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill 2010 that has kept the interest of farmers and landowners in mind, officials today asserted in the backdrop of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi’s strong pitch favouring a pro-farmer policy on the contentious issue. Officials in the Rural Development Ministry today hinted that the revised Bill may contain provisions that will allow for better and adequate compensation for those whose land...

A Right to Information (RTI) application filed by activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal seeking details to make public the assets and liabilities owned by ministers has thrown up interesting results. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), moving away from its earlier stand of not making public ministers' assets and liabilities, on Thursday gave over 400 pages of complete details filed by Members of Parliament. According to the RTI report, Minister of State for...

When noted economist Jean Dreze visited Surguja in Chhattisgarh a decade ago, its utterly non-functional Public Distribution System (PDS) looked like especially “designed to fail.” The National Advisory Committee member has written in a recent article that the ration shop owners illegally sold the grain meant for the poor and “hunger haunted the land.” But that was then. The economist was pleasantly shocked to see the transformation this time. “Ten years...

A 32-year-old sharecropper hanged himself in Ausgram's Purbachati village on Wednesday morning, the third suicide in the drought-ridden region in less than two weeks. The news spread like wildfire through the scorched fields when, just 5km away, Trinamool Congress leaders Partha Chatterjee and Sisir Adhikary were consoling the families of the earlier two victims, Jitu Bagdi and Yunus Seikh. Gosai Patra quietly walked out of home at dawn and hanged...

N C Saxena, who led the committee which recommended against permitting mining of the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa, says the same approach should be adopted for Andhra Pradesh’s MAMmoth Polavaram hydro project, too. If there is violation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) there, too, it should not be allowed, as that is the law of the land, Saxena told Business Standard. The Polavaram dam being constructed on the Godavari river by...