Three affected villages did not receive copies of the environmental impact assessment report  Despite it being Akshaya Trithiya, more than 1,000 people turned up for the hearing About 2,300 people have lost land to the project Angry protests stalled a public hearing of the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project (JNPP) at Madban village in Maharashtra on Sunday. Only after officials acknowledged their mistake of not providing copies of the environmental impact assessment (EIA)...

Information and communication technology (ICT) projects are helping countries make significant progress towards the globally agreed anti-poverty targets world leaders have pledged to achieve by 2015, according to a United Nations report released today. For the first time, the 2010 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Stocktaking report – now in its third edition – takes into account the use of social networking services. “This report charts significant progress...

By spending just Rs 6,000 crore, the government can make a huge dent in the treatment of all sick people across the whole country — currently, people are spending as much as Rs 25,000 crore on buying essential medicines. This was the strong message sent out from a National Consultation organized by several civil society groups at New Delhi on Tuesday. Officials of the health ministry and the Planning Commission...

Union ministers may be squabbling heatedly over whether the moratorium on Bt Brinjal was right or wrong, but trade associations related to soya, a commodity which has been virtually swamped by the GM variety worldwide, are clear that the growing agri-biotech bandwagon has opened up immense new opportunities for safer, traditional, non-GM soya varieties. The Soy Food Promotion and Welfare Association announced the launch of a two day International Soy...

Educating disadvantaged and vulnerable groups is key  In the face of imports posing a competition to domestic manufacturing, the government has decided to come up with a National Consumer Policy to ensure uniform national and international standards in the various arms of the Central and State governments, the regulatory bodies and on consumer fora, and to lay down the guiding principles of complaint resolution. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)will...