Seventy-eight lakh trees will be chopped as part of the forest clearance process for the 1,500MW Tipaimukh hydroelectric project in Manipur, an exercise that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says will be taken up for “national interest”. The project, which has been in the eye of controversies following opposition from Bangladesh, has received support from the Centre, which has promised not to take any steps that would adversely affect the neighbouring...

-The Telegraph   There is no jargon in Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s brand of economics — there are only blankets and bicycles and other such mundane things that he feels the poor need. And he even got a nod from a man who has received the Nobel Prize for economics. Speaking at a discussion, flanked by Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, an economics Nobel laureate and Lord Meghnad Desai, professor emeritus at the London School...

Maharashtra teeters on the brink while Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, two key states contributing significantly to grain production, have already declared a drought, potentially exacerbating agrarian distress and adversely impacting food prices. Supply of pulses, sugarcane, oilseeds, soyabean and coarse grain such as bajra and jowar, is likely to be hit, with production in the rabi season, or the winter harvest, set to decline between 25% and more than 40%, compared...

A late-night crackdown by the police and paramilitary forces on anti-mega dam protesters in Lakhimpur district triggered raging protests at several places in Assam on Monday. The police arrested more than 200 protesters, who since December 16 had been blocking vehicles transporting equipment and construction materials, through National Highway 52, for the NHPC's 2,000-MW Lower Subonsiri hydroelectric project at Gerukamukh in Arunachal Pradesh. To protest the police action, five organisations, including the...

This article seeks to explain the elements of the raging controversy over the Mullaperiyar dam for the information of the general reader. There are four distinct aspects to this case, and these are elucidated below. (a) Extraordinary nature of the project: This is a project involving the eastward diversion of the waters of a west-flowing river, which has been celebrated as a gigantic feat of 19th century engineering. It was a...