Swami Agnivesh, who was mediating the peace talks between the government and the Maoists, claimed that the Maoists were on the verge of declaring a date for a 72-hour ceasefire as the government had demanded, just before the death of the CPI(Maoist) country spokesperson Cherukuri Rajkumar, alias Azad. During his visit to

The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) Act amendment draft bill is expected to be finalised in the next three months, a top official said here on Wednesday.
The EPF has over 4.71 crore subscribers with a corpus of over Rs 2.57 lakh crore and an incremental deposit of over Rs 25,000 crore annually.

Leader of the Opposition Partha Chatterjee on Tuesday moved a privilege motion against chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee claiming he had intentionally misled the House while making a statement on Nanoor. “In reply to RSP member Tapan Hore’s query, Mr Bhattacharjee said that Birbhum SP was transferred following the

The Left Front’s Bharat Bandh on Monday brought West Bengal to a grinding halt. On the first working day of the week, empty roads in Kolkata presented a surreal picture. The City of Joy looked like a ghost city. Old timers agreed that after a very long time the city witnessed such a total bandh. On the last few occasion, common people had come out of their homes and went to their work places defying the bandh. But on Monday, they remained indoors. And many taking advantage of an extended weekend, went for a holiday to Digha and Sundarbans.

Despite the protest strike call by the Left parties and the BJP-led NDA over the price hike of petro-products, the Centre on Sunday ruled out the possibility to rollback the price hike.

The Reserve Bank on Sunday said it will come up with a discussion paper on granting new banking licences by the end of this month.

The CPI(M)’s Bengal lobby in private agreed that it was some policy decisions of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government which were responsible for this state of affairs.
This development is an endorsement of party general secretary Prakash Karat’s line. Since the Lok Sabha debacle, Mr Karat had been insisting that state-related factors

The entire CESC area was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening after a fault in the overhead line near Chakmir in South 24 Parganas. As a cascading effect, all power generating units at Titagarh, Southern and New Cossipore generating stations and unit III of the Budge Budge generating station stopped generation one after another.

Asian individual compound champion Isaiah Rajendra Sanam of Andhra Pradesh, Chungda Sherpa of Services and Olympian V. Pranitha of Steel Plant Sports Board were excluded from the Indian archery squad for the Commonwealth Games at the end of the four-day selection trials here at the SAI complex.

The state CID on Tuesday arrested five Maoists — Madhusudan Mandal, 44, Sachin Ghoshal, 42, Rajesh Mandal, 19, Siddhartha Mandal, 36, and Sanjay Mandal, 42 — from South 24 Parganas. While Madhusudan, alias Narayan, had spearheaded the Nandigram movement in 2007 from behind the scenes, Sachin is a senior member of the Maoist technical wing. They have been booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.