-The Economic Times When asked where the coal blocks will come up, the forest officer draws a clover-shaped map. Take the right at the traffic intersection, he says, and you will enter Pathriya Dand coal block. Keep going for 11 km and the road turns to the left, which is where Gidhmudi coal block is. Come back to the main road, cross over to the other side, and you will enter...

-The Hindustan Times India's ailing economy has found a new scapegoat - environment and forests. For most things that go wrong these days, from power shortage to slow growth, the blame is tossed at the door of the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), the paradigm being that forests, wildlife and green laws are hurdles to development. So much so, that a Group of Ministers established to 'rationalise' coal mining in forests...

Less than two years after splitting coal mining zones into ‘go and no-go’ — a move that has stalled almost every big-ticket coal mining project in India — the government is scrapping the policy. The Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), which had framed the policy guidelines along with the Ministry of Coal, on Tuesday accepted that the categorisation of ‘go and no-go’ did not have any legal sanctity. The move was...

This wedding season, anxious grooms from Parsa and Ghatburra, two villages in Chhattisgarh's Surguja district, were offered financial assistance from an unlikely source. Adani Mining Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Ltd, was handing out loans to all those who could prove that the money would be spent on marriage arrangements. “A company official took us to the bank, opened accounts in our names, and gave us cheques for Rs....

Agrees to consider five coal blocks to be moved from “no-go” to “go” zone In a further breakdown of his vaunted “no-go zone” concept to prevent mining in heavily forested areas, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has agreed to consider five coal blocks in the forests of Orissa to be moved from the “no-go” to “go” zone. Interestingly, the decision comes on a day when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted that he had...