The Central Government has ordered States to take all possible measures to combat a wave of child marriages which authorities fear will take place across the Hindu heartland on Tuesday, on the occasion of Akshaya Tritiya. In a letter to the States, the Women and Child Welfare Ministry has warned governments that child marriage is illegal under the Prohibition of Child Marriages Act, 2006. The Ministry has suggested that all district magistrates...

The National Green Tribunal's decision to suspend the environmental clearance given to Posco vindicates the project's critics. ON March 30, the Principal Bench of the newly formed National Green Tribunal (NGT) delivered a momentous decision suspending the environmental clearance (EC) given to the South Korean transnational corporation, Posco, to set up an integrated steel plant at Paradip in Odisha's Jagatsinghpur district. The former Union Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam...

-The Hindu Chhattisgarh government indicted for favouring firm in award of coal block The Congress on Tuesday demanded the resignation of Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, citing the contents of a Comptroller and Auditor General's report that has indicted the State government for flouting norms in the award of a coal block to a firm owned by recently elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Ajay Sancheti who, the party said, is “close...

-The Economic Times   What's common between foggy movements of two army battalions, the government auditor's assessments of large notional losses to the exchequer and a letter from the army chief to the PM on his unit's preparedness for war?  The information in each of these instances in the past six months was marked 'secret' in official files, but screamed its way to the public, forcing the government into damage-control mode.  Information leaks in...

-The Times of India The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has come down hard on the state government over water pollution. Denting the green image of Gujarat, CAG, in its 2011-12 'civil' report, claimed that there is an "upward trend" in the incidence of water-borne diseases due to heavily polluted water sources. It cited South Gujarat as the worst case, where industrial clusters like Vapi and Ankleshwar and Nandesari near Vadodara have been...