Delay in land acquisition is proving to be a stumbling block in expediting road projects as 16 schemes worth about Rs 15,000 crore are stalled due to it.
“Sixteen major highway projects in four states entailing about Rs 15,000 crore investment are stalled due to inordinate delays in land acquisition,” a road transport and highways ministry official told PTI.

Devolution of more powers to panchayats in the management of national rural drinking water mission and the issues of arsenic and shortage of drinking water will figure prominently at the two-day national conference of state ministers of rural drinking water supply and sanitation beginning in New Delhi tomorrow.

Many projects in the country may be languishing because of land acquisition problems but the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation (DFCC) has over the past three years acquired 70 per cent of the 10,000 hectares it requires to construct exclusive railway lines for goods traffic. The area acquired is more than half as large as the 18,500-hectare Kolkata metropolitan city.

While hospitals and medical colleges in West Bengal are grappling with frequent cases of infant deaths, the State Health department has issued a directive to all State-run hospitals to conduct an in-house inquiry in the event of three or more infant deaths on a single day.

Minister of State for Health Chandrima Bhattacharya told The Hindu on Wednesday that the directive was issued to make sure that there was no negligence by hospital authorities in providing treatment to newborns.

Around the same time when Mohammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were writing their Nobel story of rural empowerment, a woman in the humble districts of south Bengal started a micro-credit scheme similar to that of the Bangladeshi icon who was feted with the Peace prize in 2006. Madhuri Ghosh hadn’t heard of Yunus or his work when she formed the Bagnan I Mahila Bikash Co-operative Credit Society Ltd in 1997, but her feat is no less inspiring.

Calcutta, May 22: The impasse over the expansion and modernisation of the SAIL’s IISCO Steel Plant at Burnpur appears to have been resolved with the company tacitly agreeing to give jobs to a set of aggrieved land-losers. The commissioning of the Rs 17,000-crore project — the biggest expansion initiative in Bengal — had been delayed for months as agitators had refused to relocate a deity (Jhorabudi) from the site as SAIL was not accepting their demand for jobs.

KOLKATA, 22 MAY: State panchayat and rural development minister Subrata Mukherjee today asked all zilla sabhadhipatis and district magistrates to submit a detailed project report (DPR) for at least 5,000 km of roads across the state under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) by 14 June 2012.
Mr Mukherjee today held a series of meetings with elected representatives, district magistrates and engineers to ensure that the reports are submitted within the given deadline.

CANNING, 22 MAY: Demanding their right to the forest, Sunderbans fishermen here today said it is forest department officials who flout rules in the biosphere reserve, not villagers. "We want immediate implementation of Forest Rights Act, 2006, in the islands so that high-handedness of the forest officials stops," said Sunderbans Fishworkers Joint Action Committee member Pabitra Mondal.

Kolkata The Prime Minister’s Office is asking state-run power utilities to follow the West Bengal model in terms of tariff. The said model keeps a margin after realising the real cost of production.

The move may have been prodded by the Planning Commission, which is pushing the Centre to raise the borrowing limits of Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, so these states can take further loans to clear the power sector of debt.

Clocking a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 11.48 per cent in 2004-05 and 2010-11, Karnataka has emerged as the leading coastal State with the highest growth in fish production, according to a research and analysis released by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).

Goa, on the other hand has registered a negative growth rate of fish production as the fish production has slipped from 9.9 lakh tonnes in 2004-05 to 94,000 tonnes now because of over-exploitation of fishery resources, highlights the ASSOCHAM analysis.