After a lot of flip-flops, the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) has once again agreed "in principle" to take over the service of water supply from the public health engineering department.

“Land acquisition is becoming a bane of farmers in Haryana as the land is allegedly acquired to give benefit to brokers in most of the cases and the poor farmer is the scapegoat," former spokesperson of the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee Ved Prakash Virodhi today said.

Stressing that the land acquisition by the government should only be for public service utilities and done in a transparent manner, fully protecting the interests of the affected farmers, he said the Haryana government should immediately stop all land acquisition processes and wait for the new amended Land Acquisition Bill which is on the anvil. He said the Bill had been finalised and was likely to be passed in the Budget Session of Parliament.

Haryana has bagged Krishi Karman Award for the best performing state in wheat category for the year 2011-12. Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda received the award from President Pranab Mukherjee during a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi today.

Two farmers from the state have also been given award of Rs 1 lakh each along with citation for the highest production of wheat per hectare. Ram Kumar of Sisai Bolan village of Hisar district produced 7,700 kg wheat per hectare, which is the highest ever. The other is a woman namely Anita from Pasina Khurd village of Panipat district, who produced 6,320 kg wheat per hectare.

Three patients admitted to hospital

Panic gripped the health authorities as eight job aspirants showed swine flu symptoms during a recruitment drive at the local Commando complex. Three of them were admitted to hospital after taking their blood samples. Swine flue symptoms were noticed in a job hospirant, Sadhu Ram, who had come to the hospital two days ago and a team of doctors reached the Commando complex for a medical checkup and took samples of eight others.

The orders passed by whisteblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka as Director-General, Land Consolidation, continue to haunt the Hooda government.

Even as the controversy surrounding the fast-tracking of Robert Vadra’s land deals is yet to die down, the fragmentation and privatisation of hundreds of acres in the NCR overlooking the Aravalis, including two villages in Gurgaon and Faridabad, whose consolidation process was denotified by Ashok Khemka on the charges of purchase by a business-politico-bureaucratic-police nexus has come under the scanner of the National Green Tribunal(NGT).

A case of swine flu has been detected in Hisar.

A married woman from Tohana town of Fatehabad, who has been undergoing treatment in a private hospital in Hisar, had tested positive for swine flu. This is the first case of swine flu in this area. The woman, sources said, had delivered twins by a caesarian operation in a hospital in Tohana on December 31. She complained of breathlessness after the delivery. The kin shifted her to a private hospital in Hisar, where she tested for swine flu.

New Delhi: Taking suo motu cognizance of the TOI report on how common hilly and forest land in Aravalis is getting fragmented and privatized in the name of consolidation, National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Monday issued notices to the principal conservator of forest and the chief secretary of Haryana.

The bench headed by Justice Swatantra Kumar has listed the case for hearing on January 23. This is the first time the green tribunal has taken note of a news report on its own, considering the possible impact of diverting forest land for non-forest uses.

Farmers in the state have demanded a high-level probe into the alleged irregularities that caused lakhs of rupees to go waste due to late implementation of the Seed Village Scheme in Haryana.

The union government had come up with an ambitious scheme under which the farmers were to be provided with financial assistance for processing and distributing foundation and certified seeds at 50 per cent of the cost. Besides, they were to be trained for seed production with the latest available technology for two years after which they could take up seed production on their own.

The cold wave condition intensified with the minimum temperature plummeting sharply, throwing normal life out of gear in many places of the North. According to weather office, the lowest minimum temperature of minus 3.0 degree Celsius was recorded at Narnaul (Haryana) in the plains of the country.

With cold wave conditions raging, Delhi continued to shiver as mercury remained below normal by five notches to settle at 2.4 degree Celsius. The maximum temperature too dipped to seven degrees below normal to settle at 13.4 degree Celsius.

NEW DELHI: A law that was meant to reverse fragmentation of agricultural land, appears to have been rampantly abused in Haryana to allow influential private players get possession of hilly and non-