The much-awaited Bill on sexual harassment at workplaces gets the Cabinet nod for presentation in Parliament. ON November 4, the Union Cabinet gave the go-ahead for the enactment of a law on protection of women from sexual harassment at the workplace. Titled Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2010, the draft law is basically a new avatar of the ones prepared in 2004. This development has been...

Mahitosh Sarkar came here from his distant village in West Bengal 12 years ago looking for a better life, and he found it. He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller. His wife found work as a maid. Their four children went to school. Their tiny household, a grim but weather-tight room in a dilapidated tenement, had a color TV and a satellite...

The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty lungis, were fixed upon him. A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil to rehabilitate farmland. The soil had never arrived, and about $4,000 was missing. The...

The indiscriminate use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides over the years has led to deterioration of soil quality and crop productivity in India. According to a study conducted by the central soil water conservation research and TRAIning institute (CSWCRTI), Dehra Dun, about 1 millimetre of top soil is lost every year due to erosion. This leads to a total soil loss of 5,334 million tonnes annually, at an average rate...

Nirani convened it in Alamatti on Monday The farmers' meeting at Alamatti convened by Large and Medium Industries Minister and district in-charge Murugesh Nirani on Monday failed to arrive at a consensus on the compensation to be fixed for the land to be acquired for the Kudagi thermal power plant proposed to be set up by National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) at Kudagi in Basavana Bagewadi taluk of Bijapur district. Demands As soon...