Bhubaneswar: Orissa’s steel and mines minister Raghunath Mohanty is faced with the most difficult task of his tenure—orchestrating smooth land acquisition for South Korean steel maker Posco, maintaining peace in the villages affected by it and responding to pressure from the Central government that wants to showcase the 12-million-tonne (mt) project as one of the successes of its foreign investment policy. With the environment ministry giving its final clearance for the...

To promote self-employment among people living below poverty line (BPL), particularly women, the rural development ministry proposes to set up a dedicated national bank for women self-help groups (SHGs) and also lower the interest rate on the credit they receive from any nationalized bank. Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Monday said he will soon take up both these proposals with the finance ministry. “We have proposed a detailed paper for a...

While insisting that the environment must be protected at all costs, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan Sunday said "the past is over" and she will ensure speedy decisions on major projects like Posco and Vedanta. In an interview to news channel CNN-IBN, Natarajan, who last week succeeded Jairam Ramesh as the environment minister, said there should be clarity on decisions taken on environmental projects and that once a clearance is given, it...

Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption has a curious side-effect. It has turned the spotlight on India's lack of pre-legislative transparency. We may accept or dismiss team Anna's Jan Lokpal draft but his movement — and the subsequent build-up of hope and betrayal — has unwittingly exposed the systemic opaqueness in which our laws are conceived, written, debated and passed. The Lokpal Bill 2011 is one among 67-odd bills listed as...

-Express News Service   Affirming the trend of migration of people from villages to big cities and towns, the provisional figures of Census 2011 reveal that for the first time, India has added more people in urban centres than in rural areas over a decade. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of people living in urban areas increased from 286 million to 377 million, a rise of 91 million. In comparison, the...