West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today laid a foundation stone of the proposed Rs 3,500-crore integrated steel plant in Purulia district.

MIDNAPORE, Feb.12: Potato farmers in West Midnapore district are in dire straits as thousands of hectares of crop land have been hit by a pest epidemic. Due to significant loss incurred by the farmers, they will now face difficulties in repaying their loans.

A farmer in Garbeta II block area allegedly committed suicide by consuming insecticide last month through despair at the situation.

MIDNAPORE, Nov. 6: After a decade long struggle, the tribals in the state are finally benifitting from their traditional rights to the forest land, from which they had been deprived creating strong resentment among them.

The tribals of Midnapore West are the first to reap the benefits of the

Calcutta, Oct. 16: The government today signed a deal with NRI businessman Prasoon Mukherjee

PANSKURA: Expressing displeasure with the way emergency relief was distributed among the flood-affected people of both Midnapore East and West districts after the recent flash flood, Governor Mr Gopal Krishna Gandhi today asked the district administration of the two districts to ensure proper distribution of relief funds among the actual beneficiaries.

He, however, said that the Centre and the state should co-ordinate with each other.

ANSHUMAN PHADIKAR

An East Midnapore school still under water. Picture by Jahangir Badsa
Tamluk, July 20: More than a month after the floods in East Midnapore, some two lakh people are homeless and over 350 schools shut because they are serving as relief camps.

"Hundreds of villages are still under water,' said district relief officer Srikrishna Maity. Unless the water recedes, the government won't be able to assess the damage and fix compensation.

If the water has receded in some villages, the houses are unfit to live in.

Here is some good news for the flood victims. They need not consume polluted water as they used to for days together when their drinking water sources remained submerged in floods.

a research team has stumbled upon a bug that feasts on arsenic. Present in the root nodules of black gram, the bacteria increases soil fertility and fixes nitrogen. It could be an effective way of bioremediation of arsenic from contaminated soil, says a team of researchers from iit Kharagpur and Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal. They isolated a tolearant strain of rhizobium

State irrigation minister, Mr Subhas Naskar, today said that repair works of breached or damaged embankments are getting delayed in East and West Midnapore owing to non-availability of earth and lack of proper technology. Mr Naskar was making a statement on the recent floods in East and West Midnapore in the state Assembly.

TAMLUK: Irrigation engineers have run into trouble while attempting to repair the breached river embankments in the flood-affected areas of Midnapore East district due to the non-availability of soil. The flood conditions at a few blocks in this district continue to remain grim because of this.