-The Hindu Mega residential schools are herding in large numbers of tribal children, ‘mainstreaming’ them rather than preserving their language and heritage Tasvir, a young poet-author at Muskaan, a learning centre in Bhopal, tells us how writing can be used to empower his historically stigmatised community: “Pardhis have a rich history. But the way others label us today is wrong. I believe we should start writing and publish our stories. Our lives...

-The Indian Express People do not want to risk their homes, fields, pastures, forests and rivers in the name of development. Most of such development work in the Himalayas is being carried out without an understanding of its fragility, seismicity, glacial behaviour, climatic changes and their collective destructive power. The flash floods due to the burst of an artificial lake created by a huge landslide (rock, frozen mud and ice) in Rishi...

-The Hindu India’s leaders must recommit themselves to the ideas and activism of environmentalists involved with Uttarakhand Following flash floods at Chamoli in Uttarakhand, defence personnel are looking for missing persons in a mélange of rock, mud, water, and deBRIs, airlifting rations to inaccessible villages, and repairing BRIdges and telecommunication networks. Social scientists are assessing the disaster’s impact on the region’s economy. Scientists and policy makers are debating whether climate change or...

-NDTV blog If you had invested all your savings in the stock market at the end of March last year, by now, you would have almost doubled your money. But in the same period, India's GDP in today's prices would have slid by at least 9-10 percent. Anyone who looks at this divergence will say that the markets have completely 'decoupled' from the economy. Conventional wisdom tells us that this is a...

-Scroll.in The 126-year-old barrage has dangerously outlived its 50 years of life. Perched high up in the Western Ghats, adjacent to Kerala’s famed Periyar wildlife sanctuary, is a 126-year-old dam that has dangerously outlived the 50 years of life intended for it by colonial BRItish engineers. NK Premachandran, a member of parliament from Kerala, describes the 53.6 metre-high Mullaperiyar dam on the Periyar river as “a ticking timebomb waiting to explode, not only...