-BBC   Workers at India's top car maker Maruti Suzuki have called off a 13-day strike which had seriously affected production. The company has agreed to reinstate 11 sacked employees, and the workers have agreed not to form a new union. Nearly 2,000 workers had gone on strike demanding recognition of a new workers union. Maruti Suzuki, a joint venture partner of Japan's Suzuki Motor Corporation, has 50% of India's booming car market. The strike...

Putting water on the Concurrent List is not necessarily an act of centralisation, though it could lead to such a development. That danger is real and needs to be avoided. The Union Ministry of Water Resources has for long been arguing for a shift of water to the Concurrent List without any serious expectation of its happening, but has now begun to pursue the idea more actively. The Ashok Chawla committee,...

The first casualty of the new policy could be NTPC’s proposed plant in Burdwan district West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee may soon announce a new land use policy which says the government will not acquire land for industrial projects, leaving it to project promoters to do so. “They (companies) operate in a market economy, so must deal with market forces. They shouldn’t ask the (state) government to acquire land for them,”...

-Reuters   After Indians migrate from rural to urban areas, the longer they live in a city the worse they score on measures of cardiac health and diabetes risk compared to those who remained in rural areas, according to an Indian study. Body fat, blood pressure and fasting insulin levels -- a measure of diabetes risk - all increased within a decade of moving to a city, and for decades after, blood...

-Express News Service The Tuberculosis Research Centre (TRC) in the city, on Wednesday, announced that it had isolated a molecule that fights both tuberculosis and some strains of HIV. Researchers isolated the molecule from a marine microorganism Streptomyces sp found in soil collected near coral reefs off the Rameshwaram coast. They found that the molecule was effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes most forms of TB. The molecule also acts...