-Indo-Asian News Service New Delhi: At a time when MPs are not seen to take their legislative business seriously - the last session was an exception - the younger MPs seem to be slowly making their mark and impact in the Lok Sabha. Cutting across party lines, young members have scored higher on many fronts, especially attendance which was higher for them than the overall average. Meenakshi Natrajan, the Congress MP from Mandsaur...

-The Telegraph Mumbai: The Maharashtra Government today announced that enhanced compensation for land acquired from locals for the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Park project would be disbursed by October 15. Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan made the announcement after talks with the Janhit Sewa Samiti at Sahyadri guest house in Malabar Hill this evening. What the compensation has been hiked to from Rs 22.5 lakh per hectare in February was not clear. The Janhit Sewa...

-The Indian Express In Gujarat, growth relies on indebtedness. And relegates development. The Gujarat pattern of development has often been arraigned from the left because of its social deficits. Indeed, the state's social indicators do not match its economic performance. With 23 per cent of its citizens living below the poverty line in 2010, Gujarat does better than the Indian average - 29.8 per cent - but it reduced this proportion by...

One landmark law, the Right to Information Act, has helped over a thousand adivasis in north Maharashtra in getting closer to their rights under another landmark law – the Forest Rights Act. The latter was legislated in 2006 giving forest dwelling and other adivasi communities individual and community rights to lands they had traditionally cultivated and occupied. But communities in rural India have faced an uphill battle in getting the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The common perception of packaged drinking water manufacturers flouting norms has come true. During 2010-11 and 2011-12, at least one in every 10 samples picked up for quality testing failed. The percentage of failing samples was higher in the Delhi-Noida region and Maharashtra and Goa combined. In a written reply in Lok Sabha last week, consumer affairs minister K V Thomas submitted details of samples collected...