-Frontline The Land Acquisition Bill runs into a roadblock as political parties fail to reach an agreement on the substantive features of the draft Bill or on the amendments proposed. The efforts of the United Progressive Alliance government to broker a consensus on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012, which has been pending for over a year, have not paid off not because...

Cabinet clears change in divorce law: Women to get part of husband’s property In a move that could be a setback to land acquisition for commercial use, a parliamentary committee unanimously recommended that the government should not acquire land for industrial, commercial or for-profit enterprises or private companies. Instead, the panel, which has proposed legislation favouring landowners, recommends that private companies and public-private partnerships would have to buy land in the open...

-EPW   The system of environmental clearances for developmental and industrial projects needs to be reworked. India seems to have perfected the art of creating laws and rules that are destined to fail. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of environmental regulations. You have pollution control boards that can do nothing to control pollution. And you have a system of environmental ­impact assessment (EIA) before a developmental or industrial project...

Six years of RTI’s existence has empowered the Indian citizen as a  proactive partner in governance like never before since Independence. But the government has not been able to digest it, ever since its implementation. Instead of trying to dilute or scuttle the Act, it’s time the government abides by Section (4) norms of ‘suo motu’ disclosure Apart from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose innocence and ‘clean image’ stands exposed thanks...

More than a thousand villagers from Chhattisgarh's coal-rich Raigarh district have expressed their opposition to a mine proposed by Vedanta Resources, a giant multinational. Vedanta, if granted clearance, hopes to mine four million tonnes of coal a year to fuel the expansion of its 810-MW captive power plant on the Bharat Aluminum Company (BALCO) premises in Korba, Chhattisgarh. Vedanta acquired a 51 per cent stake in BALCO in 2001, and the...