Existing and prospective industry and mining players of Jharkhand are apprehensive about the draft mining bill, which seeks to make them share 26 per cent of profits with locals. A group of ministers (GoM) approved the draft bill on September 17. Speaking to The Telegraph, Jindal Steel & Power Limited’s (JSPL) senior deputy general manager (corporate affairs) V.P. Sharan said: “The proposed clause — sharing profits with local people — sounds...

The Ministry of Rural Development is working on on several issues related to its most ambitious programme — the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Six sub committees set up by the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), which was formed under the NREG Act (NREGA – the law enacted to implement the NREGS programme), have raised questions on issues ranging from the utility of work done through NREGS to transparency,...

For a village of 400, a lesson learnt in 1965 and acted upon 20 years later has meant that its residents don’t have to worry about Jharkhand’s recurring calamity: drought. For those living in the Gumla village surrounded by hills, parched farmlands are a thing of the past, thanks to the success of a community initiative that led to the construction of a check dam to trap the water of a...

Climate change and global food shortages could bring unexpected benefits for British farmers in the next two decades, ultimately relieving taxpayers of the burden of subsidising them, Caroline Spelman, environment secretary, has claimed. Ms Spelman said the UK was unlikely to suffer the severe water shortages that scientists predict will afflict other parts of the world, and that British farmers should be able to exploit greater demand for their produce. “Countries that...

The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence. As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China,...