Ramesh Singh, an Intelligence Bureau officer and resident of Sonepur under Chhapra, has an MNREGA job card bearing registration number 914. Singh had never applied for it, nor did he know about its issuance Uday Kumar Dwivedi, employed in the Indian Navy, is a resident of Jaitiya village under Jahangirpur panchayat of Sonepur, Chhapra. He was also issued a job card (311). He, too, does not know about it and had...

Bhubaneswar : A year after the CBI probed into the irregularities across six districts of Orissa, a special performance audit of the implementation of the NREGS programme by the Comptroller and Auditor General has found misappropriation of funds through ghost workers, uneconomic execution of the works, delay in payment, and irregular maintenance of records still plaguing the scheme. The Supreme Court last year ordered a CBI probe following a writ petition...

-PTI Raising the issue of "harassment" of tribals by forest department officials, Tribal Affairs Ministry has asked the Odisha government to ensure that these villagers get unfettered access to bamboo plantation areas for earning their livelihood. In a letter addressed to Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Tribal Affairs Minister V Kishore Chandra Deo has raised the issue of forest department officials denying transit rights to tribals in Kalahandi district and not allowing...

Indications are that many civilians were killed in the counterinsurgency operation In the early hours of Friday, about six hundred troopers from the Central Reserve Police Force and the Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) commando unit conducted an operation in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district in which 18 tribal villagers were killed and six CRPF troopers injured. Two suspected Maoists were killed in Sukma in an unrelated incident the same day. As per the...

Many were civilians caught in the crossfire, says Agnivesh The Chhattisgarh police and the Central Reserve Police Force claim to have killed 20 guerrillas of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in two separate incidents in the State’s Sukma and Bijapur districts in the early hours of Friday. But, sources in the State police and inter-faith activist Swami Agnivesh said many of those killed in Bijapur were civilians caught in the...