-IANS Lucknow, April 27: Seema Saroj, a resident of Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, was denied payment under the rural jobs scheme for months. She then joined Nari Sangh, a women's group working for the rights of people, and took on the authorities to get her pending dues. Saroj is one among over 80,000 women from 666 gram panchayats in nine districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh who have, under the umbrella of...

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday threatened to bring her anger to the streets of New Delhi and launch an agitation in the capital if the Centre didn't give in to her demand for a moratorium on debt repayment. In a rare and exclusive interview to TOI at the Writers' Buildings in Kolkata, the Trinamool Congress chief didn't once utter the words "threat" or "pullout", but her message was...

-The Times of India KOLKATA: It may be the impact of the efforts put in by officials led by panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee in the past few months, or a matter of outdoing the former Left Front government in terms of figures. But the fact is that the Mamata Banerjee government has spent a whopping Rs 982.86 crore in this March alone under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

Burdwan, April 25: The cash-strapped government has been spending almost Rs 1 crore annually on a state-owned dairy in Burdwan lying defunct for the past four years. The 62 employees at Burdwan Dugdhagar have been drawing their salaries with virtually no work though the Trinamul government is working on a plan to hand over the unit to another state-owned milk producing unit. An official said the Burdwan dairy produced 20,000 litres of...

The CBI registered over 2,000 corruption cases against public servants in the past three years but has been able to file chargesheets in only 16 cases. A senior CBI official blamed two factors: staff shortage and government departments’ stalling tactics on sanctioning prosecution or investigation. The complicated nature of the cases taken up by the CBI means the agency often has to scrutinise volumes of documents and examine hundreds of witnesses, he...