Tribal minister says he hasn’t seen the report on this, though his own secretary is a signatory

A panel set up by the Prime Minister’s Office to review the mechanism for forest clearances in industrial projects has suggested replacing the need for approval from the relevant gram sabha with state government “certificates’’. Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo says he has yet to see the report, which in effect asks for disregarding the Forest Rights Act (FRA), which he has been championing.

A provision in the law is going to impact a large number of people who have been protesting against acquisition of land for decades

The land Bill to be tabled in Parliament this week would renew hope for ‘victims’ of many a pending land acquisition case, forcing project owners to pay fresh compensation to evacuees. It is also feared that it would open a Pandora’s Box of litigation, as well as reopen cases that are decades old. The provision in Clause 24 of the law is going to impact a large number of people who have been protesting against acquisition of their land for decades, in places such as Chhindwara and the Narmada valley in Madhya Pradesh and also in Odisha, not to mention Uttar Pradesh’s Bhatta-Parsaul, a place whose cause was taken up by Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi himself. Hence, the Bill is set to be a pre-election bonanza for many aggrieved people.

The audit of the contractor's accounting books and records ..will be an independent stand-alone audit as contemplated by the PSC and subject to confidentiality arrangements between the parties to the PSC which includes the Government

The office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) said on Thursday it would have unfettered right of access to all records of Reliance Industries (RIL) during its audit of operations in the Krishna-Godavari basin and would override any conditions sought to be imposed on the process.

The court was to hear the interim findings of a Technical Expert Committee appointed by it

A task force will be set up under the Rural Development Minister to take the process forward and the first meeting will be held on October 17

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh today met Jan Satyagraha activists and agreed to their demands for framing a National Land Reforms Policy, thus cutting short the march of about 50,000 landless people to Delhi. The march, which started on October 2 from Gwalior, was discontinued after Ramesh signed an agreement with Jan Satyagraha leader P V Rajagopal for bringing in land reforms and addressing the issues of the landless poor in the country.

A 12-member group of ministers (GoM) headed by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, formed to vet certain provisions in the controversial Land Acquisition Bill, met in New Delhi on Thursday, but did not take any decision on the draft legislation.

The meeting took place amid criticisms from civil society activists that the rural development ministry had watered down some provisions of the Bill, which has been renamed as The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011. Industry representatives, however, welcomed the changes.

The visible part of the waste to go to Germany first, buried part in next phase

The 350 tonnes of toxic waste dumped on the premises of the erstwhile Union Carbide factory in Bhopal would be flown to Germany to be incinerated, either there or in any other part of Europe in line with the proposal of GIZ, the German state agency. Yesterday’s cabinet approval of the proposal marks a milestone in the nearly three-decade wait to clean the 32-acre site housing remnants of the toxic pesticides left by the company after the industrial disaster there in end-1984.

Rural development ministry ropes in Bollywood actor Vidya Balan to promote the use of toilets. Total sanitation, the official term for ending open defecation in the country, is not remotely close to either total or sanitation, show census data.

The figures supplied by state governments on the website of the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) run by the Union Ministry for Rural Development have been exposed as false to a rather overwhelming degree. While the TSC data have 68 per cent sanitation for the country as a whole, the census found just 32.7 per cent of the country was so covered. Open defecation was the practice elsewhere.

Central allocation for the Mahatama Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) has been falling in recent years, with this year recording the steepest decline.

Money released for the scheme fell from Rs 35,242 crore last year to Rs 21,441 crore this year, while expenditure has gone down from Rs 39,000 crore last year to Rs 20,000 crore as of January-end.

The relevance of the poverty line for the country is set to be redefined in the context of the ongoing Supreme Court case. The commission will take a view on removing caps on BPL (below poverty line) families. The caps are set by the Planning Commission to predetermine the number of poor in a state or district or block, based on the poverty line.