For first time since 1921, India's urban population goes up by more than its rural Is distress migration on a massive scale responsible for one of the most striking findings of Census 2011: that for the first time since 1921, urban India added more numbers to its population in a decade than rural India did? At 833.1 million, India's rural population today is 90.6 million higher than it was a decade ago....

I hear that the Planning Commission is planning to push the poverty line down a few notches so that a lot of folks can now come out bobbing up to the surface. This is being considered not out of some malicious attempt to make really poor people look just plain poor so that the real estate price in your area goes up that wee bit, but to “ensure the adequacy...

In March this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided the houses and businesses of a few top industrialists in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, home to one of the subsidiaries of India's biggest coal miner, Coal India (CIL). Dhanbad is more widely known in popular imagination as home of the infamous 'coal mafia', which spread a reign of terror across the coal mining districts of the then undivided Bihar in the...

Mamata Banerjee’s assurance over land allotment, coal access falls flat. Two weeks after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee assured JSW Steel vice chairman and managing director Sajjan Jindal that all issues will be ironed out, fresh problems, including capping access to coal mines have struck the state’s largest investment. A number of riders are creeping into the terms and conditions set forth in the development agreement that JSW Steel had signed...

‘Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do,’ is a saying Sikkim’s native Lepchas love to quote, since the state’s mountains are known to tremble often. The truth of this statement again came to the fore in the recent earthquake. Lepchas, members of one of Sikkim’s native communities with magical mythology and folklore, have been voicing their concerns over indiscriminate approvals to hydel projects in the hill state, especially those that seek to...