A FEW SLEEPY villages in the hills, about an hour’s drive from Pune, are suddenly buzzing with activity. Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of the Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), is spending Rs 140,000 crore to ‘clean out’ these villages (read tribals and marginal farmers) and build a world-class city in its place. Those pushing the project argue that urban India, bursting at its seams, just cannot cope with the large-scale migration from...

Dr U Jaikumaran is breathless with excitement over the phone. “The next five days will be hectic and crucial in our war against hunger. We have to transplant rice on 300 acres in just five days.” Dr Jaikumaran, a professor at the Kerala Agriculture University (KAU), has been building a Food Security Army (FSA) – men and women in green uniforms organised into nine regiments and 24 battalions – who are...

Activists realise it takes a fight to translate democracy from thin paper to thick action In the winter of 1997, advocate Ashok Agarwal filed a petition in the Supreme Court opposing the nearly 400 per cent hike in school fees. This was the year the Fifth Pay Commission recommendations were implemented and the salaries of teachers shot up. Parents trying to cope with the overall price rise were suddenly hit by...

‘Certain areas of judiciary cannot be made public and it is not necessary’ Institutional decisions by CJI should be kept out Certain areas of the functioning of the judiciary, including the process of selection of judges, should be kept out of the purview of Right to Information (RTI) Act in the interest of the independence of the judiciary, said Justice Rajendra Babu, the former Chief Justice of India and the former Chairman...

The recent high-pressure tactics to introduce genetically engineered food crops in India are another rude reminder that Western agribusiness companies have a deeprooted strategy to obtain a stranglehold on India’s food and agriculture system. In a review of recent trends titled ‘Food Without Choice’ (The Tribune, November 1) Prof Pushpa M. Bhargava (who was nominated by the Supreme Court in the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee to protect safety concerns), an internationally...