A senior central forest officer today sealed his report after visiting Dalma for a final word from Union forest and environment minister Jairam Ramesh on declaring the elephant sanctuary and its adjoining areas an eco-sensitive zone, a proposed tag that Tata Steel has objected to. Inspector-general(wildlife) of the Union ministry of forest A.K. Srivastava was sent to Jharkhand after Tata Steel sent a letter to Ramesh on June 24 raising concerns...

Jawaharlal Nehru University, set up as a centre for academic excellence for the whole country, mainly caters to students from UP and Bihar. This has come out in the draft performance audit report of Comptroller & Auditor General that also found JNU having diverted Rs 6.29 crore, allocated under Infrastructure Development Fund for OBC reservation, to pay electricity/water charges. The government auditor said JNU had failed to maintain an "all-India character...

-The Business Standard   By staying the state government’s hand on the return of the land acquired by the Tatas for their automobile project in Singur, the Supreme Court has injected some sense into the handling of the matter. The Mamata Banerjee government created an avoidable mess with its hasty decision to find a legislative way out of a difficult political situation. Even as the Calcutta High Court was hearing the...

It is a question that journalists in India are often asked without affection. “Don’t you have anything good to say?” A positive story, a happy story? The rebuke, when it is an e-mail or an online comment in response to an unflattering article about India, is sometimes accompanied by abuses or a general description of the journalist’s mother. And it is particularly passionate when it comes from the expatriate Indian whose...

The Orissa government suspends the land acquisition for the Posco project in the face of stiff opposition from the people. SIX years ago, when the South Korean steel giant Posco arrived in Orissa with the biggest ever foreign direct investment that had come the country's way, it was expected to help rid the economically backward State of its ‘poor' tag and bring prosperity. Posco had won the $12 billion deal at...