-The Telegraph Nengkol (South Garo Hills): Twelve-year old Persus S. Marak was at home baby-sitting his three-year old brother when he heard an uproar from below, where the coal quarry was in operation. “I ran down and found one elderly man being brought up in the box...he seemed to be injured, but after that no one was brought out,” Marak told The Telegraph this afternoon, making a cup of tea for himself...

A rural Indian spending Rs. 22.50 a day would not be considered poor by a Planning Commission whose Deputy Chairman's foreign trips between May and October last year cost a daily average of Rs. 2.02 lakh Pranab Mukherjee's stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the Finance Ministry even...

A shortage of labour is affecting cutting and polishing jobs in Surat's diamond industry. Skyrocketing prices of raw diamonds is a key factor leading to thousands of workers moving away from the diamond industry to other businesses . "The labour that came into the cutting and polishing jobs of the Surat diamond industry 20-25 years ago, that generation is moving towards retirement. And the new generation that should come in this industry doesn't...

Chief economic advisor to the finance ministry Kaushik Basu says the government should step in and acquire land for development projects to protect the interests of farmers. He also explains why the government cannot tackle food inflation by distributing free foodgrain among the poor. Excerpts from interview with ET: A large number of land-intensive project have run into opposition. Could it actually undermine our infrastructure thrust and growth? There is...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...