The Orissa government on Friday came down heavily on anti- Posco protesters by arresting 18 villagers, including a prominent anti-Posco leader, and carried on with its land acquisition drive for the South Korean steel major's 12 million tonnes steel plant near Paradip. The government officials also seized a betel vine belonging to Basudev Behera, one of the leaders of the Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS). The police detained Behera in...

The World Bank has approved $1 billion as credit and loan to support India's efforts to clean up the Ganga river. The sprawling river basin accounts for a fourth of the country's water resources and is home to more than 400 million people. The $1.556 billion National Ganga River Basin Project with $1 billion in financing from the World Bank group, including $199 million interest-free credit and $801 million low-interest loan, was...

In the first of a series of reports on land rights, we look at the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where there have been violent clashes between local villagers and police in a dispute over land. It's a hot summer day and the air is thick with smoke from the diesel-powered trucks carrying bricks, cement and sand. There is a long line of vehicles along the road as the trucks jostle...

The Mamata Banerjee government is likely to request the Centre to amend a legislation to make contract farming “optional”, an approach that leaves some room for manoeuvre and mirrors the concerns expressed by sections of the Left on agro-marketing reforms. Arup Ray, the new minister for agricultural marketing in Bengal, today told The Telegraph that the Trinamul-led government would neither promote contract farming nor allow big players to control the agro-marketing...

The rural development ministry has proposed that farmers should get 80% of the profits from resale of land bought from them for development, much higher than that suggested by a Sonia Gandhi-led panel. The National Advisory Council had pegged the compensation after resale at 25% of the profits made by private developers. The proposal, aimed at giving farmland owners a better deal, follows protests in Uttar Pradesh's Greater Noida last month over...