In an attempt to break the deadlock over the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill and the accompanying Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has invited Trinamool Congress chief and railway minister Mamata Banerjee for talks on October 25. Ms Banerjee, who has strong reservations over the twin pieces of legislation, is, as per Trinamool Congress sources, unlikely to relent. Ms Banerjee’s stand is that the state should have absolutely no...

In a first step of its kind, nine private companies have been shortlisted by the Union rural development ministry to develop infrastructure in the rural areas and maintain it for a period of 10 years. The project, envisioned as part of former President A P J Abdul Kalam’s pet scheme, Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA), will see these nine private players undertaking pilot projects in January next year...

India has chalked out an ambitious plan to connect all the villages through telephony and Internet at an investment of Rs 15,000 crore, Sam Pitroda, an adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh , said today. "A note for this investment will be sent to the Cabinet very soon," Pitroda, adviser to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations, told reporters here. The investment would come from Rs 24,000 crore accumulated...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...

Given the scale of UPA-II's proposed food security programme, getting the recipe right was never going to be easy. But even accounting for their differences, the National Advisory Council (NAC) and the government are having more problems than expected pushing the right to food legislation. Two NAC proposals have been rejected by the ministry for consumer affairs, food and public distribution, with the result that a fresh draft may need...