-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...

-The Hindu On the day that Veerappa Moily took over reins, the Environment Ministry eased environmental clearance norms for select industries, including brick kiln owners and river sand miners. On December 24, the Ministry took a decision to exempt a slew of different types of industrial and mining projects from either providing environmental impact assessment reports or holding public hearings when they are approved by the state government. Categorising these set of...

-The Hindu The Chinese government is also likely to considering locations in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu for industrial parks Beijing: Haryana has made available thousands of acres of land for purchase by Chinese companies, State government officials told potential investors here on Wednesday, in an effort to court investment into newly planned industrial bases. Haryana officials told The Hindu that the China Development Bank (CDB) - the powerful State-run bank that is...

-The Hindu Hyderabad: There are an estimated 4,000 homeless persons in the city, whose 13 shelter homes come a cropper in November's chilly nights Every night, for the last one week, Kumar Subramanyam (45) has been roaming the pavements of Padmarao Nagar, trying to find a warm spot to nestle in. He is homeless, and the winds are not too kind in November. This has been his ordeal, year after year. Like him,...

-Outlook The faecal matter hits the rotary blades, politically-but we're still staring at a sanitation disaster "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover." -V.S. Naipaul An Area of Darkness, 1964 Not...