-The Times of India A significant part of the Manmohan Singh government's political agenda for the 2014 election looks set to sail through Parliament with an all-party meeting on Thursday putting its seal of approval on a contentious bill on land acquisition that enhances compensation for farmers. The government countered criticism that the bill's provisions make land acquisition more time consuming while pushing up costs, but all major political parties seemed...

-The Times of India PABNAWA (HARYANA): It has been over 48 hours since the attack took place. But fear still stalks the dalits of Pabnawa village in Haryana's Kaithal district. The young women from the community have been moved out en masse by their families fearing sexual assault by upper-caste goons. Some were picked up by relatives from nearby villages after desperate SOS calls; others were escorted to safety by their...

KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...

-The Telegraph Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has started reaching out to leaders ahead of an all-party meeting next week to decide the final shape of the land acquisition bill. Ramesh today met the BJP's Arun Jaitley, the Rajya Sabha leader of Opposition, and the CPM's Sitaram Yechury to convince them about the provisions of the Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Bill, which seeks to replace the Land Acquisition Act, 1894. Talks...

-Frontline The Land Acquisition Bill runs into a roadblock as political parties fail to reach an agreement on the substantive features of the draft Bill or on the amendments proposed. The efforts of the United Progressive Alliance government to broker a consensus on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012, which has been pending for over a year, have not paid off not because...