Congress President Sonia Gandhi said on Thursday that land acquisition should not result in loss of fertile land. "We must protect environment to ensure sustainable development. In whatever we do, we should not forget forest and environment," Gandhi said, adding, "Farmers should be provided adequate compensation." Sonia Gandhi's remarks come a day after The Supreme court dismissed an appeal by a farmer body and upheld the Uttar Pradesh government's land acquisition...

Dow Chemical, which bought the Bhopal disaster-tainted Union Carbide, will abandon a proposed research hub in Pune and return the land because of protests by an influential sect which fears pollution of a revered river. Dow India, an arm of the US giant, will return the 100 acres to the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), the state government entity yesterday told Bombay High Court where a suit against the project has...

Shiva Solanki, the nephew of influential BJP MP Dinu Solanki, was today arrested in connection with RTI activist Amit Jethwa’s murder while waiting for an early-morning flight to Mumbai. The Ahmedabad crime branch has been on Shiva’s trail ever since an arrested police constable, Bahadur Singh, told sleuths he offered him Rs 15 lakh to have Jethwa killed. Shiva was picked up at Rajkot airport. Shiva is the vice-president of the BJP-ruled...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was right when he maintained in his meeting with the media that the judiciary should not stray into the realm of policy formulation for food management. But the same plea cannot apply to the media which brought the issue of rotting of foodgrain to public attention and virtually put the government in the dock for criminal wastage of grains in its warehouses. Policy deficiencies are clearly...

Multinational drug companies appear to have used the Prime Minister’s Office to try and influence government policies that may severely undermine availability of affordable medicines, a group of non-government organisations has said. In a joint letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 50 NGOs said the PMO had asked the ministry of health and the departments of legal affairs and industrial policy to examine intellectual property rights issues raised by foreign pharmaceutical...