In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...

-IBN   The statement of the Union Minister of State for Health, Mullappally Ramachandran, the other day that the local bodies had failed to utilise National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) funds comes as no surprise. * The last report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the implementation NRHM in Kerala had pointed out in detail the deficiencies such as absence of a perspective plan, accumulation of huge unspent funds in banks,...

-The Indian Express Unfinished car shells rusting in a deserted factory in India's West Bengal state lie testimony to flaws in a century-old land-acquisition law the government now wants to replace. * Jobs, housing, cash to landowners made mandatory * Costs, project delays to increase - Indian corporates react * Bill to push up costs by 350 pct for big plots - analysts, cos * Bill likely to be passed in December Tata Motors was forced...

-The Indian Express   Weighing in on the current debate on allowing voters the right to recall their representatives, the chief election commissioner has flagged off the destabilisation this could bring to the system. As the person in charge of overseeing free and fair elections in the country, he understandably focused on the wherewithal required to sustain such easy recourse to votes to recall legislators and elect their replacements that some civil...

The government has introduced the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation & Resettlement Bill, 2011, in Parliament. The Bill fails to address fundamental causes behind disputes and litigation over compensation. Moreover, like the existing law, it has provisions that can be misused by states to favour companies at the expense of the rights of farmers and forest dwellers. An excessive use of the emergency clause is not the only abuse of the current law...