The Karnataka government, which is in the thick of controversy over acquisition of land for several big-ticket investors, is in no mood to accept certain changes proposed in the new Land Acquisition and Resettlement & Rehabilitation Bill tabled in Parliament last week. Instead, the government is in the process of revamping its existing land acquisition policy. The state government is not agreeable to the 80 per cent consent norm proposed in...

Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...

A survey conducted across nine states by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Allahabad University suggests that the much maligned system has revived, prodded by politics, good governance and the apex court. It also found the poor to be averse to cash transfers Kotri is a mid-sized village in Desuri block (Pali district, Rajasthan), about 15 kilometres away from the nearest large bus stand and market place. We walked to...

Public health experts blame it on government complacency THE World Health Organization has raised alarm over leprosy spreading across India. With the disease infecting about 120,000 people every year, the country is now the biggest contributor to the global leprosy burden, the UN body said in a press release. The Union health ministry had declared the disease, which causes lesions on the skin and attacks nerves in the hands and feet, often...

The Planning Commission has approved irrigation projects worth an estimated Rs.2 trillion over the past year-and-a-half to bolster India’s food security, but analysts say most of the money will not be utilized because of corruption and poor execution. A total 141 projects costing Rs.1.3 trillion were cleared in 2010 alone, according to an internal Plan panel paper on investment clearance of flood control, major and medium irrigation projects and renovation and...