-The Telegraph Trinamul leaders in Singur today urged party MPs and MLAs to donate a month’s salary to help raise a fund for farmers who lost their land to the Tata Nano factory. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has time and again said that the 400 acres for which the farmers have refused to accept compensation would be returned to them but the government is engaged in legal tangle with Tata Motors since...

-IANS   Five years after a movement that catapulted it into the national spotlight and spelt the beginning of the end of the 34-year Left rule, Nandigram is still counting the losses of the bloody anti-land acquisition movement. Development is at a standstill and many of those who had been at the forefront of the movement and lost their family members say they were used as cannon fodder against the mighty Left, which...

Sanand, a taluka of Ahmedabad district, has been developing rapidly ever since Tata Motors set up its Nano plant here; it is now expected to emerge as the ‘Detroit of India’. But one of its villages, Goraj, hides an ugly fact - ostracisation of a Dalit community. The irony is that this discrimination is taking place barely 50 km from Ahmedabad where Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram (also known as Harijan Ashram)...

In the winter of 2009, Vilam Singh, a young tribal farmer from Chhattisgarh's Kawardha district, applied for 100 rupee-a-day work under MNREGA, the rural job scheme.  One year later, the same below-the-poverty line farmer bought land worth 3.36 crore rupees in another district, Janjgir Champa.  What explains the sudden turn of fortune?  "He did not turn rich overnight. He was simply roped in to act as a front by a power company that...

-The Business Standard   Almost three months ago, the Union Cabinet cleared the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011. For all projects without a public purpose and requiring more than 100 acres of land, the Bill had made mandatory the consent of 80 per cent of the people whose land would have to be acquired. In addition, the compensation for land was pegged at 100 to 300 per cent over the...