-The Hindu Around 72 villages from Maharashtra's Raigad district have started a sit-in demonstration in front of the tehsil office in Mangaon against the multi-billion-dollar ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). . The villagers who began the agitation on Wednesday will hold dharna against the acquisition of 67,000 acres of land from these 72 villages. Each village will submit its letter of opposition to the project in the government office during the dharna...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...

-The Hindu   Rs. 4.7 cr. utilised last fiscal compared to Rs. 9 cr. in 2010-11 Bangalore: In what could be read as an MLA report card in a way, the performance of a large number of the State's Assembly constituencies, gauged under the national rural job guarantee schemes, progressively fell on many fronts during 2009-12. According to data pertaining to projects taken up under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) for...

-The Hindu ‘Construct dwellings at a cost of Rs. 2 lakh each for the houseless' Gulbarga: A convention of houseless people has urged the State government to frame a separate housing policy for the poor of rural areas who are houseless and do not own sites, and constitute a village development authority on the lines of the urban development authority. The convention was jointly organised by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions...

-The Indian Express The State Election Commission moving the Calcutta High Court against the Mamata Banerjee government's unilateral declaration of panchayat election dates is a stunning development. Whatever the outcome of the court battle, the state already stands to accept that the dates it had proposed - April 26, 30 - are not going to be the schedule for the rural polls under any circumstances. Besides, it is largely believed that the...