On the first anniversary of the farmer-police clash that had claimed four lives last year, farmers of Tappal in Aligarh — who gathered in Jikarpur village on Sunday to observe ‘martyrs’ day’ — demanded that the government honour its commitments, including return of land to farmers who had refused to sell it, within 20 days. They demanded the construction of a memorial near the bridge where the firing took place on...

Fighting the insurgency will need careful planning and sustained innovation. But New Delhi seems to have only big sacks of cash and even bigger words. Eleven weeks after the annihilation of an entire company of the Central Reserve Police Force in a Maoist ambush in April 2010 near the village of Tarmetla — the largest single loss India has ever suffered in a counter-insurgency campaign — Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram...

-The Economic Times   Concern over protecting the 'holy cow' status to the job guarantee programme, MGNREGA, appears to be overshadowing genuine worries in the government over increasing shortage of unskilled farm labour. Shooting down a suggestion from Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar that the programme may be suspended during the peak farming season, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that there should not be any dilution in the programme. In an...

-The Business Standard   Even as Posco India is yet to submit a written response on the draft prepared for renewal of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Orissa government, the company is understood to have raised certain reservations over the omission of the iron ore swapping clause in the revised pact. While Posco has verbally agreed not to export iron ore from Orissa, the steel maker has requested the state government to...

The Supreme Court's threat to award death penalty for fake encounters will make little difference to the impunity enjoyed by security forces. For, its own stay order in another case comes in the way of any murder case being booked against killers in uniform. The stay order, passed two years ago by a bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, K G Balakrishnan, has rolled back an attempt made...