Batting for a Posco steel plant in Gadag, chief minister B S Yeddyurappa says the government will try to persuade farmers to part with their land. The situation does not warrant the South Korean steelmaker to relocate from Halligudi in Gadag district to anywhere rlse in the state. "The government is trying to convince the farmers; the company stays in Gadag. We hope that everything will go well,'' he told...

“This war is between a small minority of exploiters and toiling masses” The Maoists have promised to “rehabilitate” all Special Police Officers (SPOs) in Chhattisgarh who sever all connections with the State machinery and return to their villages, according to a signed press release dated July 7. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) release was issued in the backdrop of a July 5 Supreme Court ruling that the use of armed SPOs...

The Mamata Banerjee government has initiated an ambitious project to bring specialised health care to rural Bengal, asking private hospitals to set up “super-speciality” units alongside state-run hospitals in the districts. As a start, the chief minister has taken up with cardiologist and Asia Heart Foundation chairman Devi Shetty a plan to set up six such hospitals that would provide the sort of critical care that is now missing in most...

-The Times of India   Maoist-affected districts across the country might have seen years of neglect by successive governments, but a new Central scheme - Integrated Action Plan (IAP) - under the UPA-II is fast filling up the 'critical gap' in those 'deficit zones' through taking up a number of development projects. As many as 67,072 basic infrastructure projects across 60 districts in nine states have been taken up at Rs 2,740...

The Supreme Court order against the Salwa Judum’s vigilantism in Chhattisgarh must be read by all, especially government officials. The details of the civil war in the tribal districts of Chhattisgarh are largely unknown to most readers of this newspaper. For the region is remote and inaccessible, and easily ignored by the national media.   This civil war pits, on the one side, Maoist extremists, and, on the other, a band of...