Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said he’d set up an advisory council with participation of industry to look into policy issues regarding environment clearances. The council, to meet once in three months, will examine suggestions on changes required in policy for faster environment and forest clearance. In an interaction yesterday with the Confederation of Indian Industry, he also endorsed the view that all projects related to natural resource extraction should be...

To avoid a clash with the Union Environment and Forest Ministry over environmental clearance for coal projects, the Coal Ministry has sought permission for Mining on the land which is not under dense forest and wildlife corridor. A proposal to this effect has been submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, by Union Minister of State for Coal Sriprakash Jaiswal. It is against the backdrop of increasing coal production that permission has...

NC Saxena , the influential former bureaucrat who is a member of the National Advisory Council, has raised the ineffectiveness of government programmes among tribal people in a paper that will come up for discussion before the Sonia-Gandhi headed council. The government relied on a report by Saxena last year in denying clearance to a large Mining project by Vedanta Resources in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills . This had attracted international...

“All these people who got MBAs made a mistake,” according to Jim Rogers, the commodities investor, at the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit last month. “The City of London and Wall Street are not going to be great places to be in the next two or three decades. It’s going to be the people who produce real goods in charge – the farmers and the miners.” With commodities up 42pc since the beginning...

If forests belong to the forest-dwellers, then the coastal areas should belong to the fishing community. Acting on this line, the government is proposing to bring in a new law — modelled on the Forests Rights Act — to establish rights of fishermen on the coastal areas and resources found therein. The Forests Rights Act, passed by Parliament in 2006 and brought into force in 2008, recognises the rights of tribals...