RTI activist Ramesh Agarwal has been arrested and chained to a hospital bed Chhattisgarh's Raigarh after a complaint by business group, the Jindals. Agarwal was arrested on May 28 by Chhatisgarh Police based on a complaint filed by the Jindals. Photographs available with CNN-IBN clearly show that Ramesh has been handcuffed. Agarwal is apparently paying the price for being a whistleblower as he had written to Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh...

Yes, food prices are rising but more competition is not the answer — it's time to stop over-consumption. Slowly, surely, a new mixture of consensus and fault lines is emerging about world food. On the one hand, there is agreement we are entering a new era in which basic agricultural commodity prices are rising after decades of falling. This will hit the poorest hardest, as an Oxfam report this week on...

Exasperated with the public perception of its role, the Indian government appears keen to somehow abdicate its key sovereign function of making land available for economic development by dumping it on the private sector. This is wrong. The maintenance of up-to-date land records, the scientific identification of tracts for a shift from agricultural to non-agricultural uses and the smooth transfer of land assets are the functions of the sovereign. The...

What does it take to get the government to fight corruption? One answer could be: a medical facility with an air-conditioned Intensive Care Unit, a team of 60 doctors, a media centre, 1,300 toilets, seven large screens to pipe live action, television sets, and a storage facility of 100,000 litres of water. This is some of the infrastructure behind Baba Ramdev’s fast that starts on 4 June at New Delhi’s Ramlila grounds. Ramdev...

The farmers' struggle against land acquisition only shows that from passive forms of protest they have turned to active forms of resistance. THE recent agitation by farmers in Uttar Pradesh against cropland acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is only the latest in a long series of protests by farmers and rural communities, which started a decade ago in different parts of the country and which gathered momentum over the past five...