Rainfall during the remaining two months of the monsoon season is likely to be 10 per cent below normal, weather scientists said today, predicting monsoon behaviour that they say “has the potential to hurt crops in some places”. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said rainfall over India during August and September is likely to be 90 per cent of the long period average, after a copious 111 per cent rainfall in...

-The Hindu   NCRB's 2009 report puts number of those abducted at 8,945 RTIs filed by an NGO in 2009 show an average of 60,000 children are reported missing annually in the country. However, the National Crime Records Bureau's (NCRB) annual report on Crime in India (2009) puts the number of abducted children at 8,945. Time lapse, insufficient information database and an ineffective tracking system minimises the missing children's chances of coming...

This essay describes and compares Parliament and the Supreme Court and examines the relationship between them. Parliament may still be a great institution, but its members are no longer great men. How long can a great institution remain great in the hands of small men? The SC has held its place in the public esteem rather better than the Lok Sabha, despite the occasional allegation of financial impropriety. Parliament, the...

Mahtab Alam examines the trouble with the steel project and suggests a way out THE PROPOSED mega Posco project and the anti-Posco movement are back in the news after the violence at the proposed site on 16 July. According to the reports I got, on that day, eight platoons of police attacked and lathicharged peaceful protesters in the village of Nuagaon, Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha. The protesters, despite being mostly women, were...

A war has broken out in some parts of east-central India, especially some regions of the Dandakaranya forests that span across the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh. Reportedly, there are thousands of Maoist guerrillas armed with sophisticated weapons confronting a vast array of paramilitary forces assembled by the government of India. Caught in the crossfire are millions of poor, marginalised and historically isolated adivasis. Their habitat, in which...