A team of officials, led by Assistant Commissioner Prabhuling Kavalikatti, raided a black stone quarry in Vitla in Bantwal taluk and rescued 39 bonded labourers, including some children, on Wednesday. While some of them are from Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu, others belong to Kanakapura near Bangalore. They were given meagre wages and were not allowed to leave the quarry for six years, according to Mr. Kavalikatti. He described it as...

The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him. A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The...

A widening corruption scandal that has touched India’s prime minister sent the country’s stock markets down sharply on Friday and threatened to tarnish the country’s image as a rising economic power. Setting off the turmoil was a report from the country’s auditor earlier this week that about $40 billion in wireless spectrum license fees had been squandered by the government’s telecommunications and information technology minister. On Thursday, India’s Supreme Court criticized...

Whatever the justification given by journalists whose names have come up in the `Radiagate' expose, there is no question that it has forced much-needed introspection. For years, the cosiness between prominent media persons and both politicians and the corporate world had become blatant. But rarely to the point where it was flaunted as it is today. In many ways, the 24-hour-news format and television have made this evident with anchors...

The ambitious Polavaram project, the multi-purpose project proposed across the Godavari for making optimum utilisation of water going waste into the sea, is mired in problems. The much-talked about project, aimed at stabilising the century-old Krishna delta and irrigating over 7 lakh acres in the upland areas of East and West Godavari districts, is dogged by uncertainty since it became a bone of contention between different regions and faced with litigation....