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....

Nitish orders suspension of investigating officer, two other policemen In yet another incident of police brutality, policemen mercilessly beat up several persons, including women, in Bihar's Nalanda district on Thursday. The incident occurred when a large crowd trooped in front of the Noorsarai police station to protest against the recent disappearance of a young woman Sushma Kumari alias Reena Devi, who is the panchayat secretary. The mob alleged that the investigating officer (IO)...

-The Telegraph   The Arjun Munda government today unveiled a host of health initiatives for the benefit of villagers, especially expecting mothers and schoolchildren, and flagged off a number of specialised mobile clinics, indicating its seriousness about improving medical standards across the length and breath of Jharkhand. Among the schemes launched by the chief minister at a state health department organised function at Haribansh Tana Bhagat Stadium were a school health programme that...

-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

Do agencies like the Ford Foundation push their own agenda through the NGOs they support? It’s often said, tongue in cheek, that India’s “shadow” government works out of the nondescript, low-slung buildings abutting the Lodhi Garden in Delhi. That’s partly hubris, but it also stems from being close to the centre of power. This rarefied zone houses powerful “cultural” institutions like the India International Centre, as well as a host...