-The Hindu District Mineral Foundations were set up to protect the interests of Adivasi communities who have borne the costs of mining. But they are flawed in their current form Through 2011-13, dogged investigators from the Justice M. B. Shah Commission on illegal mining toured the rust-red villages, forests and rivers of northern Odisha, and trawled through reams of official records including from the environment, minerals, railways, and revenue departments. They met...

-Business Standard Govt concludes it has no mapped information on perennial rivers, dams & irrigation projects which would be impacted by coal mining To be finalised soon by the government, the number of inviolate coal blocks where mining will be banned is likely to be reduced from the originally identified 206 to less than 35. The environment ministry has decided to again dilute the parameters for identifying which of India's 793 blocks...

-IPS News GUNTUR, India: Thirty-seven-year-old Kode Sujatha stands in front of a hut with a palm-thatched roof, surrounded by a group of men shouting angrily and jostling one another for a spot at the front of the crowd. Each of the boatmen, who carry sand mined from a nearby river to the shore every day, wants to be paid before the others.   Sujatha stares hard at them, holds up a piece of paper...

-The Indian Express A joint venture between the Railways and the Karnataka government, the original project involved construction of 329 bridges and 29 tunnels, and required felling of more than 2.5 lakh trees on 965 hectares of forest land.  The Rs 2,315-crore Hubli-Ankola railway line, cutting across the Western Ghats in Karnataka, has been shown the red signal by a Supreme Court panel on forest and wildlife, which said that the...

-Livemint.com BJP’s U-turn on the proposed land Act reflects a re-balancing of deeper political forces that are at work in India’s political economy The recent U-turn by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government on the proposed amendment to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (henceforth the land Act), can be viewed narrowly as a Congress victory in the ongoing tit-for-tat game that is short-changing...