-The Indian Express Large numbers of the tribals who have gathered in the Mumbai are not seeking a loan waiver, but the implementation of the vision envisaged in Forest Rights Act, a legislation enacted by Parliament in 2006. The nearly 40,000 sunburnt and dusty men and women waiting patiently in an open ground in Mumbai on Sunday night tell the story of the continuing gloom in Maharashtra’s farmlands more succinctly than the...

-The Hindu A Supreme Court Bench will decide whether the law has to be interpreted expansively or in a narrow sense In July 2011, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government embarked on an ambitious project to rewrite the law on land acquisition. How the government acquired land from private parties had long been the subject of heated dispute, often resulting in violent conflict. Several previous governments had made attempts to amend the Land...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-The Hindu The Constitution Bench in the land acquisition case must show us that the court still respects rules of precedent Entrenched in our commitment to a rule of law is what lawyers describe as stare decisis. That is, in plain English, a promise to stand by things decided, to respect and honour precedent. Today, with the Supreme Court seized by a maelstrom of crises, this principle stands deeply undermined. At first,...

-PTI The government has to walk a tightrope to balance farmers' and consumers' interest in view of the Budget announcement on MSP that could further push up inflation, industry body Assocham said today. In the Union Budget 2018-19, the government promised to fix the minimum support price (MSP) at 50 per cent higher than the cost of production. "The Budget with a huge focus on agriculture has raised expectation level in rural landscape....