Sessions court in Ara district had sentenced them in May 2010 The Patna High Court has acquitted all the 23 persons accused of perpetrating the massacre of 21 Dalits at Bathani Tola in Bhojpur in 1996. The accused were convicted by the sessions court in Ara district and sentenced in May 2010. While three persons were awarded capital punishment, the remaining twenty were handed life imprisonment. A Division Bench of judges Navneeti Prasad...

Experts agree that the economic and environmental costs of interlinking India's rivers far outweigh its projected benefits. Some people believe it is the one-stop solution to prevent floods and droughts, reduce water scarcity, raise irrigation potential and increase foodgrain production in the country. But others say it is just another grandiose scheme involving huge costs and leading to long-term ecological consequences. The contentious idea of interlinking India's rivers has come...

 If the data provided by the Union government is to be believed, various bigwigs of the Congress, the Communist parties, the socialists and the Janata Party have been placed in the list of "freedom fighters". Prominent among these are Giani Zail Singh, P V Narasimha Rao, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, Darbara Singh, Morarji Desai, Biju Patnaik, Devi Lal, R Venkataraman, Kamla Bahuguna, Babubhai Patel, Lalita Shastri (wife of Lal Bahadur Shastri), Indrani...

It is worrying that the Tendulkar method, chosen by the Planning Commission to calculate the poverty line in its latest figures, underestimates the levels of poverty while overestimating poverty reduction. The figures show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05. A poor person has been defined as one who spends R28 per day in urban areas and R22.5...

The idea of interlinking rivers is appealing because it is so grand, but this is also the reason it is nothing more than a distraction The Supreme Court recently issued a diktat to the central government about the scheme to interlink rivers. The directions are straightforward. The government shall set up a high-level committee of ministers and other representatives on interlinking of rivers; the committee shall meet “at least once in...