World Bank arm finances polluting steel mill in Jharkhand As the train slowly approaches Jamshedpur town in Jharkhand, the sky begins to turn reddish. It is because of the thick red dust emanating from an industrial unit, surrounded by heaps of industrial solid waste comprising unburnt coal char and flyash. The unit is a medium-scale iron and steel mill belonging to conglomerate Usha Martin. Spread over 120 hectares, the mill became operational...

The corruption paranoia, blamed for the policy paralysis at the Centre, is threatening to take a toll on Bengal by clouding the timetable of the much-delayed Jindal steel plant at Salboni. Banks and financial institutions are unwilling to give loans to the project because of uncertainties surrounding the mining sector. The Jindal project may require loans totalling Rs 10,000 crore in the first phase to build a 3-million-tonne plant. The proposed Salboni...

Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar’s suggestion to ban Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) during farming season may not get government’s approval. Instead, the MGNREGA guidelines may be amended to increasing synergy between the world’s biggest social security scheme and agriculture sector to improve production. A set of green methodologies could be included in works allowed under the scheme. Pawar had written to Prime Minister on November 28 seeking the ban....

At the technical level, the question is whether the technology deployed for identification will return answers that are unambiguous. THE Unique Identification (UID) project, the national project of the Government of India, aims to give a unique 12-digit number – called Aadhaar – to every citizen of the country, a random number that is generated and linked to a person's demographic and biometric information. The key word is “unique”. Launched in...

-The Telegraph   The Union health ministry today warned that bottle gourd juice should not be consumed if it comes from bitter-tasting pulp in an advisory on a practice promoted by yoga and Ayurveda evangelist Baba Ramdev among others. “Bitter-tasting bottle gourd juice should not be consumed at all,” the ministry said, urging that a small piece of the pulp of bottle gourd, lauki in Hindi, should be tasted before the Extraction of...