-Economic and Political Weekly   Much work remains to be done if the new Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act has to mark a meaningful shift for India's adivasi communities. Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) is a multimedia journalist and researcher, and currently with the Publics and Policies program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Among the worst excesses committed in India's six decade-old democracy, the forcible displacment...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India will seek changes to international copyright regulations so that students and researchers can procure photocopies of expensive books without having to pay royalties, a senior government source said. Come December, he said, the Union human resource development ministry will ask the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) to relax its norms that protect authors' and publishers' commercial rights over their books. The ministry will suggest at the next general...

-The Hindu The devastating landslips were caused by the undercutting of fragile hillsides for highways rather than by dams, which actually helped mitigate the floods The natural calamity of June 16 through 19 that devastated the whole of Uttarakhand and large areas of Himachal Pradesh and western Uttar Pradesh - an area of almost 20,000 sq.km. - was one of extremely rare severity among all the hydro-meteorological disasters to have struck India. Intense...

-The Hindu The UPA government has decided to bring amendments to the National Food Security Bill to help secure more support for the "game changer" legislation in Parliament. The government may move some of the changes proposed by other political parties, such as the DMK, the BJP and the Left parties, as official amendments. At a meeting of senior Cabinet ministers convened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, it was decided that...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has modified the norms of an education scheme to allow partial funding of state government-aided secondary schools in a move that could benefit Bengal the most. Funds under the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) have so far been limited solely to government-run institutions. The four-year-old scheme provides grants to set up schools, improve facilities in existing ones and recruit teachers. Most secondary schools in Bengal are aided institutions,...