In Greater Noida, farmers resist fiercely attempts to take over their land for the Yamuna expressway and a hi-tech city. IT is a tale of two worlds, one in the present and the other in the future; one living and breathing and toiling away in parts of the National Capital Region and the other beautifully blueprinted and waiting to be willed into reality by the government and its elites in...

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” This quote by US President Ronald Reagan summarises the significance attributed to facts, figures and data and the need to make them freely available across servers and bandwidths. In this age of internet and mobile networks, the amount of information available to us is far more than...

-The Central Chronicle   On an experimental basis, mobile banking services have been introduced in eight districts of the state to disburse wages to labourers in their villages itself under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). There are plans to expand mobile banking services to remaiNINg 42 districts. Under the plan, wages amounting to more than Rs. 74 crore have been paid to over two lakh 75 thousand labourers...

Food-price inflation in India, Asia’s third-largest economy, may accelerate in the second half as farmers are paying 20 percent more to grow crops, according to the commission that helps set minimum farm-product prices. “The cost of production is going up very fast,” Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The labor cost has gone up dramatically in the past one year...

Around 20 people were arrested on Thursday for allegedly trying to obstruct the process of land acquisition for the Rs 52,000 crore Posco steel plant near Paradip. Activists of United Action Committee (UAC), who earlier backed the mega project, were taken into custody as they blocked the entry route to Gada Kujanga opposing land acquisition work, resumed after NINe months on Wednesday, police said. "About 20 people were arrested after effort to persuade...