Unpaid bills of Rs 17,000 crore — and growing — have revealed hidden food subsidies and acute financial mismanagement as the government prepares to adopt the costliest, most ambitious legislation of its tenure. Documents accessed by Hindustan Times reveal this is the money the government now owes the state-run Food Corporation of India (FCI), hampering its mammoth operation of buying grain from the farmer, storing it and selling it cheaply...

Villagers in Nuagaon, Gadakujang and Dhinkia have accused the United Action Committee (UAC) of helping the government acquire betelvines for the proposed Posco project. Ranjan Swain of Nuagaon, said, "For five years, the betelvines were a stumbling block for Posco to acquire land for its Rs 52,000 crores project at Gadakujang, Dhinkia and Nuagaon gram panchayats. But now their movement against Posco is falling like ninepins and the authority has...

Riding on the determination of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the draft law that will make access to food a constitutional right will be ready within 15 days, a minister said on Monday, even as police detained some members of the National Advisory Council (NAC). “We are in the process of finalizing the draft Bill,” said minister of state for food K.V. Thomas. “I have discussed it (the Right...

Bhatta Parsaul was once a quiet farming village but now, as it finds itself at the centre of a major political row, it is strewn with mounds of ash, burnt-out motorcycles, tractors and cars. In early May villagers here clashed with armed police who tried to break up a four-month-old sit-in protest at the village. They had been fighting the terms of the acquisition of their farmland in the Greater Noida...

In Greater Noida, farmers resist fiercely attempts to take over their land for the Yamuna expressway and a hi-tech city. IT is a tale of two worlds, one in the present and the other in the future; one living and breathing and toiling away in parts of the National Capital Region and the other beautifully blueprinted and waiting to be willed into reality by the government and its elites in...