-The Hindu Business line It must focus on human security and societal development rather than feed the avarice of a golden ghetto minority The discipline of economics has long been obsessed with gross domestic product as the base measure of development. Contemporary economic globalisation and its dominant neoliberal ideology see other considerations as not worth more than a passing glance. Neoliberalism, which used to be referred to as the Washington Consensus, was promoted by...

-The Hindu For the Chenchus, the Nallamala forest is their home. Not any longer after a National Tiger Conservation Authority order stripped them of their rights in a bid to fortify India’s largest tiger reserve. The sun has barely risen but the Chenchu men and women along with their children are out on a long trek, one which will take them deep into the Nallamala forest along the Eastern Ghats, in...

-Hindustan Times The animating impulse of Indian politics, pundits of all stripes insist, is youthful aspiration: fearless young people throwing off the shackles of caste and class to Whatsapp their way to what the Prime Minister likes to call “vikas”. Parties like the Bharatiya Janta Party understand this, the argument goes, and are handsomely rewarded; the opposition doesn’t, and is doomed to failure. But a recent CSDS-KAS survey paints a rather different picture:...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-Scroll.in Suranga is a horizontal tunnel-like well excavated in a hillside. Even as Kerala reels under severe drought, Gangadhar Rao never misses a day to irrigate thousands of areca nut trees, coconut trees and pepper plants on his 30 acres of farmland. Rao is a farmer from Bedadka Panchayath in Kerala’s northernmost district of Kasaragod and depends on Suranga for all his water needs — irrigation and domestic — round the year. Suranga is...