Mamata Banerjee today said private investors “are staying away from Bengal because land is not available for them”. However, she laid stress on the importance of public sector projects — the state has attracted some — saying “public sector investment is also investment”. The chief minister, whose government’s hands-off policy on land acquisition has so far acted as a deterrent for private industry, said at a railway programme in Hooghly’s Dankuni: “The...

Why has there been such a silence from dalit leaders over the Bathani Tola judgment acquitting all those accused of killing 21 dalits? At the same time, what explains their loud protests over the Ambedkar cartoons in the textbooks? Has the elevation of Ambedkar as an icon relegated the dalit leadership to a politics of empty symbolism? Is the issue of a lack of accountability in the judicial system towards...

-The Hindu A group of tribal workers of the Priyadarshini Tea Plantation, under the aegis of the Congress Vythiri Mandalam Committee, encroached on plantation land at Lakkidi on Sunday morning and erected huts demanding two acres of land for each tribal family and Job Opportunities for them. T. Nazar, president, Vythiri Mandalam Congress Committee, said the tribal workers in the Lakkidi unit of the plantation had been leading a wretched life since...

Soon, the country’s estimated 40 million people with disabilities will be able to track Job Opportunities at the click of a mouse. www.jobability.org will be launched tomorrow at a national conference on livelihood for persons with disability held by business chamber Ficci. The site is designed to be friendly for the disabled and will be exclusively for use by such people. The portal, the first such initiative in South Asia that...

 Twenty-two newbie managers, fresh from B-schools across India, are raring to go. Only, they won’t make spreadsheets to sell soaps or fizzy drinks. From June, they will assist senior bureaucrats across 11 districts of Jharkhand where the Centre is funding uplift schemes. These managers — from IIT-Kharagpur, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)-Mumbai, Visva-Bharti in Bengal’s Santiniketan, XISS-Ranchi, XLRI-Jamshedpur and others — are Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows in some of...