-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a fresh threat to the fragile ecosystem of the Aravalis, the Haryana forest department has reversed its earlier order and asked officials not to designate lands in the range as forests, other than those formally recorded as such. The order implies that vast tracts of forests, including most parts of the sacred Mangarbani grove, would now be recorded as 'not forest'. This reverses the department's...

-Maintream Weekly In order to reduce and remove the many-sided disadvantages and problems faced by Dalits and adivasis, sub-plans for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have been introduced to ensure adequate and justice-based availability of funds for these communities. Summarising the basic idea and rationale for this, the Planning Commission says: “the persistence of socio-economic backwardness of the SCs and STs in spite of the development efforts had warranted a special...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday sought the Centre's response in four weeks to a PIL challenging the validity of the land acquisition ordinance but hoped that the Narendra Modi government would revert to legislative process soon and render the PIL "infructuous". Three Delhi-based NGOs — Delhi Grameen Samaj, Gram Sewa Samiti and Chogama Vikas Avam Kalyan Samiti — and Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) have challenged the...

-The Hindu Business Line   Land holders deserve a just, dignified deal. The 2013 came close to that; now, we are turning the clock back It isn't really surprising that the public debate over the land acquisition law has been reduced to a simplistic narrative of whether farmers have become the stumbling blocks to India's growth story by refusing to part with their land. In the past, debates over big dams and nuclear...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: As the NDA government's land bill remains stuck in a logjam with the opposition stonewalling it in Rajya Sabha, it's the UPA's 2013 law that has for now benefitted a section of landowners in Delhi. In a series of judgments pronounced in recent months (as late as March), the Delhi high court has scrapped acquisition of several acres of land in Delhi by government agencies, some...