-The Times of India   Bapi Sarkhel, in the eye of a storm since the December 14 violence near Poscoproject site in Jagatsinghpur, said on Thursday certain politicians seeking his arrest had benefited from him in the past, but turned against him as they saw him as a threat. Police has booked him on charges of fomenting trouble in the proposed Posco steel plant site and attacking anti-land acquisition villagers in the...

The government’s desperate race to redraft the Lokpal bill in time for passage this Parliament session has left political circles uneasy, with even some Opposition leaders conceding the dangers of lawmaking under such abnormal pressure. The Centre too is squirming at this “indecent haste”, prompted by its keenness to avoid another face-off with Team Anna. But it feels it has little choice in a political climate where “confrontationism” is giving the...

Two days after a clash at the proposed Posco site that left one person dead, the Orissa government on Friday shifted senior IAS officer Priyabrata Patnaik from the post of chairman-cum-managing director of Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO) even as the opposition continued to demand a CBI or a judicial probe into the incident. With just about a year to retire, Patnaik, a 1976 batch officer, has been posted as additional...

In U.P., where 70 per cent of the people depend on agriculture, FDI in retail does not produce any cheer. ON a misty Monday morning in early December in Muradnagar, a small town in western Uttar Pradesh, numerous tractors and trucks, loaded with jaggery and driven by farmers themselves, lined up in front of the smallest grain mandi (market) of the region. With unusual patience, the drivers waited for their...

-ANI The statistics for farmer suicides in India are as striking as they are shameful. One farmer suicide every 30 minutes in 2009, screamed a NYU School of Law report earlier this year. If one accepts that many suicides also go unreported, even this shocking statistics is perhaps an under-estimation. Why, then, would another three suicides, this time in Madhya Pradesh's Hoshangabad District, be newsworthy? For one, the suicides took place during the...