-The Hindu     Lakshmi Puri calls for greater political momentum on Women's Reservation Bill "My ambition for my country is it should become a democracy for women, by women and of women. This revolution is happening at the local level but [it] should also happen at the State and national level," said Lakshmi Puri, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and acting head of U.N. Women. She believes much progress has been made by...

-The Hindu Ahmedabad: Going by the Gujarat government's figures, memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) worth $876 billion were signed during its five biannual Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summits from 2003 to 2011 and a whopping 84 per cent of the projects have already been implemented or are under implementation. This would mean Gujarat has overtaken all of China, whose FDI inflows during this period were to the tune...

-Reuters Millions of people in Maharashtra are at serious risk of hunger after two years of low rainfall, coupled with poor management of water resources, have left dams empty, farmland parched and cattle emaciated, aid agencies warned on Thursday. Maharashtra -- one of the country's biggest producers of sugar, pulses, cotton and soybeans -- is reeling from the worst drought in more than four decades after receiving less than 50 percent of...

-The Telegraph Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has started reaching out to leaders ahead of an all-party meeting next week to decide the final shape of the land acquisition bill. Ramesh today met the BJP's Arun Jaitley, the Rajya Sabha leader of Opposition, and the CPM's Sitaram Yechury to convince them about the provisions of the Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill, which seeks to replace the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Talks...

-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...