"India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously." Arundhati Roy Controversies, protests and violence have marred land acquisition for projects in India. Protests against acquiring agricultural land, inappropriate compensation or environmental impact have been the main reasons for these protests. In most cases, the protests are by farmers who are hardly compensated after their fertile agricultural land is taken over in for...

THE MURDER of Right to Information ( RTI) activist Dattatray Patil at Ichalkaranji in maharashtra has left the community worried, which wants the state government to take some firm action. This is the third such incident in the state where RTI activists were either killed or threatened with dire consequences after their exposes made local politicians uncomfortable. Unidentified assailants threw chilli powder on Patils face before stabbing him to death last week....

Gujarat's business acumen and entrepreneurial zest is passé; the State's leap-frogging with 11 per cent agricultural growth, praised by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) last year, is old hat too. What is new is this: Gujarat may now export more ‘kesar', the famous mango variety of the State, to West Asia than maharashtra sells alphonso; the State has entered Goa market with cashew nut; and an Ahmedabad-based part-time...

Monsanto licencees have earned over Rs 1,500 crore since 2002. A quiet but determined battle is being fought in the courts, and outside, by US agricultural biotech giant Monsanto, its Indian affiliates and seed lobbyists to free the prices of genetically modified Bt cotton from state government control. At stake is huge business running into several thousand crore of rupees, with royalty alone on the Bt cotton seeds grossing over Rs...

Getting 55 weddings done in 90 minutes flat won't rank as a record. Getting them done at no cost to the very poor families involved might qualify as one. That these are actually part of a successful maharashtra government programme surely sets this up for a Guinness Book entry. The 55 couples in Nandura tehsil of Buldhana district are all Muslims. And there's a dual minority angle to it —...