-The Indian Express Unfinished car shells rusting in a deserted factory in India's West Bengal state lie testimony to flaws in a century-old land-acquisition law the government now wants to replace. * Jobs, housing, cash to landowners made mandatory * Costs, project delays to increase - Indian corporates react * Bill to push up costs by 350 pct for big plots - analysts, cos * Bill likely to be passed in December Tata Motors was forced...

-The Economic Times   The Planning Commission's affidavit to the Supreme Court that anyone with a monthly expenditure of more than Rs 965 in urban areas and Rs 781 in rural areas would be deemed 'not poor' has been greeted with howls of indignation. Rightly so! Though both numbers - adjusted for inflation - are an improvement over the Tendulkar Committee's numbers of Rs 447 a month in rural areas and Rs...

India has been ranked the fourth most dangerous country in the world for women, but the widespread practice of selectively aborting female foetuses may make it the most hostile to the female gender. In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, where the child sex ratio (0 - 6 years of age) has dropped to 886 girls per 1,000 boys - according to provisional data in the 2011 census - a strong civil...

The foreword — to the Draft National Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill 2011 — that says “urbanisation is inevitable” (I.p.1) signifies danger. The Bill, if enacted in its present form, is likely to worsen, and not stop, displacement of tribal, Dalit and other backward communities. The Bill states: “The issue of who acquires land is less important than the process of land acquisition, compensation for land acquired and...

Each day, one thousand women die in childbirth and one million people become infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including 7,000 cases of HIV. Yet these numbers are preventable, experts insist, when countries possess the resources and willpower to address and deal with them. Dignitaries and high-level officials gathered this week to discuss reproductive health commodity security (RHCS), or, simply put, ensuring that people have access to essentials of reproductive health...