While Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan is proud that the State has an impressive 98.69 per cent disposal rate of requests under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the murder of two campaigners who used the law to good effect is a blot. First, it was Satish Shetty at Talegaon, near Pune, who was killed on January 13, and more recently Dattatray Patil at Ichalkaranji, in Kolhapur district, on May 22....

For the preparation of the Commonwealth Games 2010, around Rs 17,400 crore have been spent on Delhi by the government over the past three years. The over-used word deployed by public leaders and officials to describe the city, which they hope will emerge from these exertions, is ‘world-class’. But forgotten are the men and women whose toil will make this ‘world-class’ city possible. At its peak in 2008-09, an estimated...

A FEW SLEEPY villages in the hills, about an hour’s drive from Pune, are suddenly buzzing with activity. Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of the Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), is spending Rs 140,000 crore to ‘clean out’ these villages (read tribals and marginal farmers) and build a world-class city in its place. Those pushing the project argue that urban India, bursting at its seams, just cannot cope with the large-scale migration from...

The Maharashtra government will amend its Development Control Rules, in a bid to contain criminalisation of realty. It also plans to strictly implement the provisions of Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code to stem the growing nexus between Builders and gangsters and easy flow of black money into the sector. "If Builders are found guilty, they will be blacklisted. They will be debarred from any contract from the government or...

It is probably the best news for Mumbai's leading Builders who had invested thousands of crores of rupees on buying prime plots to develop flats and residences but got stuck in the environment tangle as the land was classified later as forest area. After years of uncertainity, the Supreme Court on Monday cleared their construction activity. However, the green light came with two riders — one they must pay the...