Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

In what appears to be a travesty of justice, three petty thieves were convicted of murdering National Highways Authority of India whistleblower Satyendra Dubey, who had exposed corruption in the PM's Golden Quadrilateral Project in November 2003. Six years after his murder, a Patna fast-track court on Monday convicted all the three accused in the case. Judge Raghvendra Singh will decide on the quantum of punishment to the three convicts...

UNLESS THE prices of vegetables skyrocket and become a scandal — as they have over several weeks now, or as did the price of sugar last year — little in the out-of-sight world of Indian agriculture excites the imagination of the city folks, who influence, rather disproportionately, everything from government policies to newspaper content. Few of those who enjoy a hearty meal and wax lovingly on their favourite dishes can...

Ten days before it comes into force, the Right to Education Act has been challenged in the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private and minority schools. One of the petitioners’ main complaints is that the act will force these schools to teach up to a fourth of their students free of cost if they come from the neighbourhood. Another is that the schools cannot even pick and...

The central vigilance committee led by retired Justice D. P. Wadhwa, which was established by the Supreme Court of India to monitor its orders in the PIL on the right to food, has come out with a strong indictment of the public distribution system (PDS). Based on State-level reports for Delhi, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Karnataka, the committee has identified widespread corruption at different levels of the...