-The Telegraph West Bengal: An agent of the Saradha Group fell ill in Siliguri today after a three-hour demonstration while investors hit the streets with placards asking the chief minister to give them back their money or provide them with poison. Dinabandhu Pal, who had collected Rs 16 lakh for the Saradha Group, was admitted to Siliguri subdivisional hospital after he complained of palpitation in front of Siliguri police station. His wife...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...

-The Telegraph Chief minister Mamata Banerjee will not know Pushpa Tudu. Neither will state election commissioner Mira Pande. Such an assertion can be made because Pushpa Tudu does not want her real name to be published - a wish that tells the human story behind the stand-off between the Bengal government and the state election commission. Early last week, Pushpa Tudu (name changed), a probable CPM gram panchayat candidate, was addressing a small...

-The Financial Express Differences have cropped up between the Planning Commission and food ministry on the issue of creation of two million tonne capacity silos through the public- private partnership (PPP) mode. Sources say while Food Corporation of India (FCI), the nodal agency to implement the project, has been insisting on making 'railway siding' mandatory for silos, the Planning Commission believes that the construction of railways siding would increase the cost of...

-Frontline There are no effective vaccines against Japanese encephalitis, but its spread can be controlled in India through vector management.  JAPANESE ENCEPHALITIS, or JE, has become endemic in many parts of the country, occurring repeatedly in epidemic form in many of them—for instance, in parts of Gorakhpur in northern Uttar Pradesh. One can expect JE-type epidemics year after year in States where prolonged drought-like conditions are followed by heavy monsoons. This leads to...