-The Hindu "Collusion with Ajit Pawar to get Vidarbha land for his NGO" Training its guns on the Bharatiya Janata Party, India Against Corruption (IAC) on Wednesday alleged that the party president Nitin Gadkari took undue favours from the Maharashtra government in allotment of land acquired from Vidarbha farmers for a “public purpose.” For their generations-old land the farmers were compensated with a paltry sum of Rs. 5,000 per acre in 1981-82. Addressing...
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Infra projects should not fall foul of Forest Rights Act: KC Deo -Smita Gupta
-The Hindu Draft Cabinet note on NIB not sent to me, he says Infrastructure projects that come up on forest land must comply with the Forest Rights Act (FRA), Union Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo has said. No land in a Fifth Schedule area should be handed over to any industry if it violated the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), Mr. Deo said, responding to a query whether he agreed...
More »Don’t ink this NIB
-The Hindu The Finance Ministry proposal to create a National Investment Board with extraordinary authority to supersede individual ministries and decide the fate of expensive infrastructure projects is a retrograde measure that strikes at the root of democratic governance. The basic tenets of all law-making include public participation, equity and justice, more so when it comes to the environment and welfare. India’s laws on protection of the environment, forests, wildlife and...
More »Jayanthi assails investment super committee proposal -Shalini Singh
-The Hindu Proposed NIB would be illegal, she says Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jayanthi Natarajan has expressed “very serious concern” at the setting up of a National Investment Board to fast-track clearances of major infrastructure projects, saying the “concept is unacceptable,” documents exclusively obtained by The Hindu reveal. In a five-page letter sent to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on October 9, Ms. Natarajan said the proposal would upturn established procedures...
More »There is no ‘foreign hand’-Amita Baviskar
-The Indian Express Conspiracy theories are a handy standby when one wants to avoid the effort of critical thinking. So Tavleen Singh would rather rely on “the foreign hand” — that old bogey out of Indira Gandhi’s box of tricks — than examine facts that reveal uncomfortable truths. Lamenting the closure of the Vedanta aluminium refinery at Lanjigarh, Orissa (‘Why India could remain forever’, IE, September 30), Singh asserts that, if...
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