Five persons, including a woman, were killed and over 20 injured when villagers suspecting a house was being used by armed Communist Party of India-Marxist cadre gheraoed it and were fired upon from inside in Lalgarh area of West Midnapore district on Friday.
Altogether eight teams comprising six members each entered Gobindpur gram panchayat area in Jagatsinghpur district and conducted socio-economic and forest land survey without police protection, a senior official said.
A local court in Karnataka on Wednesday extended the judicial custody of self-styled godman Nityananda Swami, arrested on criminal charges including rape, till May 26.
The chronology of major Maoist attacks in the country in the last five years
Sanskrit may have ceased to be spoken by people, but there is a remote village in this coastal district of Orissa where every home has a pundit of the ancient language. Sasana village in the Shyamsundar gram panchayat area is almost an anachronism in today's culture which no longer takes pride in mastering the language which, along with Latin, was once the two most dominant languages in the world.
A revenue department official said against 4,500 sand spots across the state, only 1,300 which had been cleared by the respective gram panchayats are available for auction.
A law making it compulsory to vote, a none-of-the-above feature, as well as the right to recall and neutral democracy at the grassroots can go a long way in stimulating the democratic processes, writes Mahesh Vijapurkar.
Police said miscreants torched several houses late Monday night, triggering retaliation from the affected communities, resulting in a bloody clash in which firearms were used by both the communities.
The rate of increase in coronavirus cases in Maharashtra between February 14 to March 23 was three times that recorded in the previous four months, data shows.
At least 12 people were killed and more than 150 others injured this evening as a tornado wrought havoc and left trails of devastation at villages in Rajkanika block of Orissa's Kendrapara district.
The Orissa state government has shifted nearly 4000 people living in coastal villages in Kendrapara district's Satabhaya gram panchayat due to their villages being engulfed by the sea.
The minister also appealed to the people of Kashmir to hoist the national flag in their homes on August 15.
In a circular to the banks, the central bank has clarified that the directions of gram panchayats and municipal councils will not apply to such houses as they neither sanction plans nor issue completion certificates for the same.
The Karnataka legislative assembly on Monday passed a unanimous resolution condemning the recent defacing of Shivaji Maharaj and Sangolli Rayanna's statues and burning of Kannada flag, and said such incidents will be considered as an act of sedition and strict action will be taken against those involved under 'Goonda Act.'
'The police are busy arresting people from Delhi, but not those we saw burning our home!'
The bird flu virus was detected in blood samples of dead birds, from Nadilag village of Bishalgarh subdivision, at the High Security Animal Diseases Laboratory in Bhopal on Wednesday. A red alert has been sounded and import of poultry and eggs from outside the state, including neighbouring Bangladesh, has been banned. Personnel of the Border Security Force and special surveillance teams were keeping vigil in the border areas.
The Trinamool Congress welcomed the Supreme Court verdict on panchayat polls in West Bengal as a "victory of democracy" and asked opposition parties to apologise to the people of the state.
Making use of the time at hand, he carried out the sanitisation drive with his brother, uncle and a friend to help him out.
Modi government has earlier faced criticism from the Opposition on a number of occasions for renaming the schemes including PURA launched by the UPA in past.
Most of the 40 MLAs in the Shinde camp don't have enough legislative experience to conduct business in the House and so the first ministry expansion needed induction of veterans.
Rural budget set to increase; likely to enhance market linkages for agri commodities
Soon after the incident, hundreds of villagers of nearby villages assembled and staged a dharna leading to tension in the area.
The lawyer for a village panchayat in Uttar Pradesh, where actor Amitabh Bachchan was allotted a farmland, on Thursday said the panchayat would not launch criminal prosecution against the Bollywood star if he forgoes his claim over the plot.
In an unusually candid admission, the CPI-M blamed corruption and dishonesty among its leaders at the village level for the party's poor show in the recent panchayat elections across the state. "Not everybody in the CPI-M-controlled zilla parishads, panchayat samitis and gram panchayats is honest. We have corruption in our functioning. Even though they are few in number, we have to find out how this happened," CPI-M state secretary Biman Bose said.
Pintu Pawar's dead body was found on Monday at Dhanora in Beed district, 200 km from his village, said assistant inspector Dnyneshwar Kuklare of Ambhora police station. Pawar, who worked as sugarcane cutter in cane fields, was native of Dhopte Pondul village. He was visiting his parents at his sister's house in Pune when lockdown was imposed, and got stuck there.
School Education Minister Vijay Shah says if successful, the proposal will be sent to make this must in all govt schools.
The innovative Rajiv Gandhi Rural Twenty20 Cricket tourney, brainchild of Rahul Gandhi, will conclude later this month, with Gandhi expected to be the chief guest at the final in Amethi. The tourney comprises 1,857 teams, just from the Amethi parliamentary constituency, participating in 1,819 matches. The winning team would get a cash prize of Rs three lakhs, while the runners up will be rich by Rs 1 lakh.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday called for ending "sarpanch-pati" culture in panchayats, the practice of husbands of women sarpanches exercising undue influence, as he pitched for a leadership role for elected village representatives to alleviate poverty and promote education.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday launched the 'historic' National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme aimed at providing right to legal livelihood to the rural poor.
However, experts say that unless clear guidelines are there, it remains to be seen how many people fall within the ambit and who remains excluded.
The socio-economic and caste census 2011 painted a grim picture of rural India, indicating that one out of three families living in villages is landless and depends on manual labour for livelihood.
He also said the governments of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BSP and the SP that have ruled Uttar Pradesh in the last 32 years, when Congress was not in power, failed to live up to the expectations of the people and the Congress was set for a comeback in the state.
The panchayat polls will be seen as a kind of verdict from the hinterland for Yogi Adityanath ahead of the crucial 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections.
Hundreds of chickens have died in Hingna village, 10 km away from Patur tehsil town in Akola district in Maharashtra since Friday, official sources said adding, the deaths were not caused due to bird flu.
Posco India is open to realigning its project area and one of the options could be to the south of the site.
Posco-India has made it clear that it has no intention to shift the site of its 12 million tonne steel project.
The temptation to get into businesses that are hot is perhaps too great for any politician, no matter what his public slogans are. Nehru plunged into hot sectors of his time -- engineering and iron and steel. Modi has plunged into digital payments -- the hot sector of his time, notes Debashis Basu.
'Congress leaders don't believe in themselves and in the potential of the party.' 'Unless they have faith in themselves, only then will the public have faith in them.'
World Bank has suggested 'hire and fire' powers for panchayats to enable local administration to deal with resource crunch so as to control their budgets better.
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