Revenue dept issues direction to district collectors to provide details and particulars about all the activists seeking information under RTI Act In a move likely to raise a controversy, the state government is planning to keep all the RTI activists under  scanner. The state revenue department is learnt to have asked the district collectors to submit the details and particulars of all RTI activists from their districts, who have been filing...

-The Indian Express   The way to Posco project remained blocked with irate villagers of Mathsahi and Balisahi of Nuagaon panchayat opposing work for the fourth day on Wednesday. Incidentally, these two villages are main entry points to Nuagaon and Dhinkia panchayats and the administration had planned to take up work in other hamlets after felling trees here. While the recent face-off between villagers and police turned Posco supporters into antagonists, the...

The draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill 2011, proposed by the NAC, has attracted welcome debate. Any legislative measure, intended to correct a historical wrong, should indeed be subject to the closest scrutiny to improve and strengthen it. For if we get this right it can help realise, far better than we have so far, the constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. This bill is built on India’s...

A war has broken out in some parts of east-central India, especially some regions of the Dandakaranya forests that span across the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh. Reportedly, there are thousands of Maoist guerrillas armed with sophisticated weapons confronting a vast array of paramilitary forces assembled by the government of India. Caught in the crossfire are millions of poor, marginalised and historically isolated adivasis. Their habitat, in which...

The Rural Development Ministry seems to be a familiar ground for Jairam Ramesh . No sooner was he given the new portfolio, he announced that the two bills related to land acquisition would be clubbed. The minister spells out his priorities in an exclusive interview with ET. Excerpts: What will be the key motif for the omnibus land acquisition law you are proposing? The bill will be facilitative not restrictive....