The Orissa government has failed to keep its commitment for renewal of the revised MoU with Posco-India Ltd for setting up 12-million ton steel plant near Paradip by July end as the South Korean company has not agreed to certain conditions in the revised MoU. Even as the tenure of the previous MoU expired on June 21, 2010, the state government had gone on acquiring land for the proposed steel...

27 party supporters killed since election results announced The Left Front would raise the issue of terror being unleashed upon its CADres and party workers in protests outside the State Assembly and Parliament and may also raise it during the all-party meeting called by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, State Left Front Committee chairman Biman Bose said here on Thursday. Claiming that 27 supporters and party workers had been killed since...

Prakash Karat has decided to share a dais with civil society activists Prashant Bhushan and Aruna Roy, stirring debate in the CPM which largely considers NGOs and their members “anti-Left” and accuses them of furthering the “imperialist strategy”. Some in the CPM believe the general secretary’s presence at the public meeting against corruption will amount to extending legitimacy to the “action groups”, the party’s name for voluntary organisations. Others, though, see Karat...

A war has broken out in some parts of east-central India, especially some regions of the Dandakaranya forests that span across the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh. Reportedly, there are thousands of Maoist guerrillas armed with sophisticated weapons confronting a vast array of paramilitary forces assembled by the government of India. Caught in the crossfire are millions of poor, marginalised and historically isolated adivasis. Their habitat, in which...

In a season when every self-styled warrior against corruption is trying to look for a new weapon to fight it, my guest today is Satyananda Mishra, Chief Information Commissioner—someone who has in his control the strongest of those weapons, the RTI. Actually when it all began, nobody thought it would be so effective. In a period of five-and-a-half years, it has touched the hearts and minds of people. The number of...