-NDTV Solapur: Drought has tightened its grip over Maharashtra. But ask the people of the drought hit village of Ropala in Solapur district, the epicentre of Maharahstra's drought, and they will tell you it is a crisis created not by nature but political clout. The villagers live just a few miles from the Ujani dam, one of Maharashtra's biggest, but don't receive a drop if its water. They claim it's because influential people divert...

-The Hindu   Efforts by the Pollution Control Board to improve groundwater quality in Ghaziabad have proved futile so far The contamination of groundwater in and around Ghaziabad's industrial areas has become a cause of concern, apart from reports of its fast deteriorating air quality. All remediation efforts to improve the groundwater quality have so far been futile, say residents of the area. Efforts by an expert committee set up by the Uttar Pradesh...

-The Times of India JAIPUR: Nearly 284 children were rescued and 55 child traffickers were arrested from various West Bengal-bound trains in the past 24 hours in Bharatpur and Jaipur. These kids were being transported to Bihar and Bengal and as many as 19 out of the 284 were from Jaipur itself. The Rajasthan State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (RSCPCR) officials— with the help of the Jaipur and Bharatpur collectors...

-The Economist Government borrowing generates inflation, widens the external deficit and crowds out much-needed investment. Can India now overcome its debt addiction? INDIA has grappled with its public finances for long enough. When presenting its first budget after independence in 1947, the finance minister of the day insisted that the country was not living beyond its means. Yet every budget since has failed to produce a surplus. India borrows more heavily...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...