In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...

‘Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do,’ is a saying Sikkim’s native Lepchas love to quote, since the state’s mountains are known to tremble often. The truth of this statement again came to the fore in the recent earthquake. Lepchas, members of one of Sikkim’s native communities with magical mythology and folklore, have been voicing their concerns over indiscriminate approvals to hydel projects in the hill state, especially those that seek to...

The Planning Commission has approved irrigation projects worth an estimated Rs.2 trillion over the past year-and-a-half to bolster India’s food security, but analysts say most of the money will not be utilized because of corruption and poor execution. A total 141 projects costing Rs.1.3 trillion were cleared in 2010 alone, according to an internal Plan panel paper on investment clearance of flood control, major and medium irrigation projects and renovation and...

One started reading the new Draft National Land Acquisition and Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill 2011 with expectations of a great improvement over the 2007 Bills. There are indeed some very good features in the new Bill but, on the whole, one must regretfully report disappointment. Let us see how the Bill deals with some of the key issues involved. (i) Acquisition of agricultural land: The Bill rules out the acquisition, not...

Even as the area around Parliament was swamped by crowds of Anna Hazare's supporters, demanding a stronger Lokpal Bill on Wednesday, a small group of environmental activists staged their own demonstration against a different bill, the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill, 2011. Science and Technology Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was scheduled to introduce the controversial BRAI Bill in the Lok Sabha, but the House did not conduct regular business due...