-IANS Kolkata: A youth was quizzed by police on Sunday after he asked a minister why Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee did not visit a slum in West Bengal where 700 shanties were destroyed in fire on Saturday. The incident happened during Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim's visit to Sholo Bigha slum in the Maheshtala Santoshpur area of South 24-Parganas where a blaze had rendered 1,500 people homeless on Saturday morning. Pratap Naskar, who...
More »SEARCH RESULT
700 shanties gutted in Kolkata fire, no casualties
-PTI KOLKATA: Around 700 shanties were gutted in a fire in Santoshpur-Maheshtala area on the outskirts of the city today, leaving more than a thousand people homeless. Police said no injuries or casualties were reported but four persons were caught by locals from the spot and handed over to police for allegedly indulging in arson. Seven fire engines went to the spot but could do little as the vehicles couldn't cross the railway...
More »Days of excessive profits are over-Ajay Dsouza
-The Hindu New, more fair and transparent norms for iron ore mining are now being put in place in many States Hit by debilitating mining curbs (including an outright ban in some States) and a clampdown on exports through high duties, India’s iron ore industry today is a pale shadow of what it was for much of the last decade, despite some recent forward movement on restarting iron ore mining in Karnataka,...
More »For richer, for poorer-Zanny Minton Beddoes
-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...
More »Reform by numbers
-The Economist Opposition to the world’s biggest biometric identity scheme is growing FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges—feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads—it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world’s biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities. Launched in 2010, under a genial ex-tycoon, Nandan Nilekani, the “unique identity” (UID) scheme is supposed to roll out trustworthy, unduplicated identity numbers based on...
More »