Nagesh Prabhu

The Karnataka State Highway Improvement Project-1 (KSHIP-1), which was executed between 2001 and 2007, with a World Bank loan of $447 million, has reduced road accidents on national highways.

To silence critics who decry acquisition of land for infrastructure projects, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has sought the power to vest back unused acquired land to the original owner.

Faced with stiff opposition towards highway widening and BOT-based road development, an all-party meeting on Tuesday decided to temporarily discontinue land acquisition for the four-laning of the national highway in Kerala.

Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority (GCZMA) asked Public Works Department to replant three times the wide tracts of mangroves that would be cut for national highway expansion in near future.

''The government and the contractors are planning to acquire nearly 68 acres of additional land worth about Rs 680 crore in the name of four-laning of NH-17 between Nanthoor and Talappady. It will be an injustice that several families will be thrown to streets,'' said Mangalore MLA U T Khader.

Incensed at repeated delays in land acquisition, which has had a telling effect on the UPA-II

With around one lakh trees axed to widen the NH-1 in the state and the Forest Department not getting land to plant saplings, the state may be heading for a major ecological crisis.

According to documents available with The Tribune, if the Forest Department does not take action, chances are that they might lose Rs 45 crore given as funds for afforestation by the Union Ministry of Forests.

Expressing serious concern that in the absence of any regulatory legal mechanism, very few Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) signed by steel companies with mineral-rich states were translating on the ground, the high-level Inter-Ministerial Group has pitched for

Popularly known as Kashmir of South India, the coffee land and the land which gives birth to Cauvery is geographically a unique land.

The process of land acquisition between Asanboni in Seraikela-Kharsawan and Galudih in East Singhbhum for the proposed four-laning of NH-33 will begin soon.