After a spate of strikes in the Gurgaon-Manesar auto cluster, labour unrest now seems to be brewing in Maharashtra. Workers at utility vehicle major Mahindra & Mahindra’s Nashik facility on Tuesday issuing a notice to the management to go on strike on or after March 11, if their demands for higher wages were not settled by the company. Production work, too, was temporarily disrupted in two assembly shops at M&M’s […]

Indian auditors have alleged corruption in a flagship government scheme to write off debts of poor farmers, Indian media reports say. In a report tabled in the parliament on Tuesday, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) said it found lapses in 22% cases where loans were written off. Waivers were given to many ineligible people while those eligible were not considered, the CAG report said. The $1.8bn (£1.2bn) debt relief […]

NEW DELHI: A total of 3,34,340 new primary and upper primary schools have been opened under the Right to Education (RTE) till September 2012, since the enforcement of the RTE April 1, 2010, the Economic Survey, released Wednesday, said. Over 2,80,000 new school buildings have been constructed, and over 12,46,000 teachers have been appointed under the scheme in that time, the survey said. Talking about the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, the […]

Sahara investor Surendra Kumar Jaiswal, at his shoe-buckle workshop in Baiganwadi slum in central Mumbai. In the narrow lanes of Baiganwadi, a slum in central Mumbai, it’s hard to spot the local office of India’s multi-billion-dollar Sahara Group, which owns hotels in New York and London, and a Formula 1 racing team. Sahara’s one-room Baiganwadi office, just a few kilometers from a municipal garbage dump, is located on top of […]

NEW DELHI: Maharashtra government has initiated proceedings to ban Abhinav Bharat, the radical Hindutva outfit accused of launching bomb attacks at Mecca Masjid, Malegaon, Samjhauta Express and Ajmer Sharief. Sources in the home ministry here told TOI that the Maharashtra government has referred the file — seeking to ban Abhinav Bharat — to the Centre for its views. The Centre has forwarded the file to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), […]

Drinking water eludes Juhapura even six years after it was brought under the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, but India’s largest Muslim ghetto in the suburbs of the Gujarat capital is about to get its first corporation school. The announcement was made on February 17 in the 2013-14 corporation budget. The building of the primary school is to come up in Sankalitnagar and it will be functional within a year, said AMC […]

Four years and 11 terror attacks after the 26/11 nightmare, the country still hasn’t woken up to the need to speed up the setting up of two big hi-tech projects that could help prevent terror strikes. The National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) meant to set up a sophisticated network that could pull out data about any terrorist suspect within a matter of seconds – has slipped on deadlines since various departments were too […]

THE GHOST of kickbacks in botched armed deals, which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was wishing away for the past one year, has come back to haunt the UPA 2 in a big way. In the ongoing Budget Session of Parliament, the UPA government faces a barrage of accusations from the Opposition — the still unravelling AugustaWestland chopper deal and the role of Deputy Chairman of Rajya Sabha PJ Kurien […]

In Pic :In this 2010 file photo, Kuki National Front cadres arrive at Natheljang in Senapati district of Manipur to deposit weapons as part of a Suspension of Operation agreement with the Centre. With Manipur’s Kuki groups again in protest mode, it is time to ask why the Centre ignores their calls for a dialogue but talks to Nagas Manipur, with a population of over 2.7 million, is home to […]

The Acorn That Was gives a brief history of Providence Women’s College The first women’s college in the Malabar had a difficult birth. Adventures were many, so too moments of dejection, but the grace of Providence was strong. In the early 1950s, a group of young women tamed an unruly Florican Hill to start one of the well-known campuses in Kozhikode. The Acorn That Was documents the tale of Providence Women’s College, […]