In Greater Noida, farmers resist fiercely attempts to take over their land for the Yamuna expressway and a hi-tech city. IT is a tale of two worlds, one in the present and the other in the future; one living and breathing and toiling away in parts of the National Capital Region and the other beautifully blueprinted and waiting to be willed into reality by the government and its elites in...
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A frenzied media fails to use the RTI Act by Manu Moudgil
“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” This quote by US President Ronald Reagan summarises the significance attributed to facts, figures and data and the need to make them freely available across servers and bandwidths. In this age of internet and mobile networks, the amount of information available to us is far more than...
More »Land Bill: Centre will take Mamata on board
-Deccan Chronicle After initiating discussion on the proposed Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill, Union rural development minister Vilasrao Deshmukh on Friday expressed confidence that the Central government would be able to take the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamul Congress on board on the issue. He reiterated that the Centre would be able to draft a “pro-farmer” land acquisition law. The Trinamul Congress had been opposed to changes in land acquisition laws. Even RLD chief...
More »You will be on BPL list if your annual income is Rs.27,000 a year by K Balchand & P Sunderarajan
The income limit for households for qualifying as a beneficiary under the BPL (below poverty line) list has been pegged at about Rs. 27,000 per annum, according to the methodology approved by the Union Cabinet on Thursday. A household with an annual earning of more than Rs. 27,000 will stand excluded from the BPL list. This is what the automatic exclusion and automatic inclusion criteria and the seven deprivation indicators are...
More »What's in a name? urban or rural? by Kala Sridhar
What is rural and what is urban is largely an artefact of definition and relative. See the table below. Most of India's 'rural' population resides in villages that contain between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some argue that in other countries, many of these villages would be classified as urban. These studies point out that if India were to be a little more liberal in its definition of urban areas (minimum...
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