We are not acquiring a single inch of land of farmers, says official

The Gujarat government is acquiring 920 square km of land, most of it agricultural, of 15,000 farmer families spread across 22 villages for Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR) project.

Supreme Court issues notice to Centre, MoEF, 19 States

The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Centre, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Central Pollution Control Board and Chief Secretaries of as many as 19 States, including Gujarat, on an industrial pollution public interest litigation petition filed by the Gujarat-based Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti and the Farmers Action Group.

877 hectares of land will be acquired for 6,000-MW project.

It could not have been more poignant than this when a sea of humanity in the heart of the rain-starved Saurashtra region in Gujarat took a pledge here on Sunday to conserve water by adopting drip irrigation on a massive scale and check the mining of groundwater.

A staggering 1.25 lakh people from across 4,800 villages of the State’s largest region that often falls prey to drought-like situations gathered on the bone-dry catchment of the Bhadar dam to decide to conserve water and appeal to the State and Central governments to speed up solutions to their water woes.

With Governor Kamla Beniwal giving her approval, the decks have been cleared for a controversial Gujarat law that makes possession of licence mandatory for sinking a tubewell, borewell or artesian well on any agricultural land and also has a provision for imprisonment.

The BJP government steamrollered the Gujarat Irrigation and Drainage Bill 2013 in the Assembly on February 27, despite stiff resistance from the Congress and Keshubhai Patel’s Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP).

Environmentalists say EIL is not qualified to conduct study, want report to be reviewed by an independent experts panel

Environmental experts and activists, who have alleged that Engineers India Limited (EIL) is not qualified and accredited as yet to conduct an environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the Mithivirdi nuclear power plant in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region, have found serious gaps in the EIA report itself in its present form. They have demanded that the EIA presented by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) as submitted by EIL should be reviewed by an independent experts committee.

It stoutly opposes Gujarat Forest Department proposal to divert land

The Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife (NBW) has put its foot down against the laying of a road across the Kutch desert sanctuary — the largest breeding ground of flamingos in the entire Indian subcontinent — following a site report by an experts panel that the construction would wipe out the population of the already endangered bird.

The BJP pushed the Sethusamudram project it now rails against. Government records reveal just how DARSHAN DESAI

Illegal variants of GM seeds are threatening the future of cotton in India