Clean URL's and apache mod_rewrite

After a lot of brain storming and googling around I could fix the issue of Clean URLs which were not working even after having all the configurations right as per my post http://webtecblog.blogspot.in/2012/06/removing-indexphp-from-codeigniter-urls.html. The following modifications in httpd.conf saved my life.

The default settings were
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

which I modified to

<Directory />
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

And things started working for me. Hope this helps others as well.