-The Business Standard It will make the coercive powers of the land acquisition law irrelevant, though including it in the central Bill would be unconstitutional The proposal to amend the central Land Acquisition Bill to provide for leasing of land rather than acquiring it is just not constitutionally feasible. Land is a state subject and the Centre cannot legislate on leasing at all. But as an idea it is great and should...

-The Economic Times For many, it is a sense of deja vu. Fifteen years ago, the government and India's financial regulators came under fire after hundreds of crores were cleaned up by a few individuals and entities from gullible investors, who were promised fabulous returns from plantation schemes. In the uproar that followed, the government and the regulators sought to palm off the responsibility of regulation of such schemes on each...

-The Indian Express The proposed land bill will make transactions fairer and encourage optimal use of the resource In this session, Parliament will take up the necessary and long-delayed Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill. Both major parties have worked out a consensus on the features of the bill. As with any compromise between different interest groups, the bill does not please everyone perfectly, but it finally sets down reasonable terms for...

-Reuters Millions of people in Maharashtra are at serious risk of hunger after two years of low rainfall, coupled with poor management of water resources, have left dams empty, farmland parched and cattle emaciated, aid agencies warned on Thursday. Maharashtra -- one of the country's biggest producers of sugar, pulses, cotton and soybeans -- is reeling from the worst drought in more than four decades after receiving less than 50 percent of...

-The Hindu Around 72 villages from Maharashtra's Raigad district have started a sit-in demonstration in front of the tehsil office in Mangaon against the multi-billion-dollar ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). . The villagers who began the agitation on Wednesday will hold dharna against the acquisition of 67,000 acres of land from these 72 villages. Each village will submit its letter of opposition to the project in the government office during the dharna...