-The Telegraph   Land protesters today uprooted a portion of the fencing for the airport city project at Andal near Durgapur claiming the plot belonged to them and alleged that they were yet to get compensation. The crowd of over 50, which included farmers, share-croppers and farm labourers, marched to the site in Dakshinkhanda area, 200km from Calcutta, around 11.30am. They first shouted slogans and then yanked off barbed wires put up for the...

For the Government of India the first phase of the national solar mission has been a grand success. It not only managed to attract industry to invest in the generation of an energy considered costly, but also dramatically drove down the cost of producing this energy. In its celebration, little did the government realise that a major conglomerate had subverted rules to acquire a stake in the solar mission much...

-The Hindu   The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) is totally safe, asserts the expert group constituted by the Government of India. In a release, A.E. Muthu Nayagam, group convenor, said, “Based on its extensive examination of various issues, there should be no cause for concern about the safety” of the plant. He pointed out that it was designed and engineered to the state-of-art of nuclear reactors in line with the current international safety...

At a time when the outrage over the video showing Andaman’s Jarawa tribals being made to dance in front of tourists is yet to die down, the Orissa SC/ST department is parading people from aborigine tribes for visitors at a state-organised tribal fair that kicked off here on January 26. About 250 tribals, many of them from aborigine communities from across the state, have been brought as “live models” to the...

-The Economic Times   The IMF wants to increase its lending capacity by $1 trillion, to rescue distressed countries in the eurozone plus those hit by aftershocks from the eurozone.  But US is struggling with fiscal problems of its own, Japan now has the highest debt/GDP ratio in the world (over 200%), and Europe is moving into an austerity phase. Clearly, a significant chunk of the new trillion will have to come from...