Viju Diwa is barely 11. So it seems strange to see him carrying bricks on his head. “He is not a labourer here,” Kisan Mhatre, a brick kiln owner of Mharal village outside Mumbai’s far northern suburb of Kalyan protests and shouts at his father and worker Arjun, 30. “They push their children into labour and then the government, the media and everyone comes to trouble us,” says Mhatre. When this DNA...

India’s per capita availability of water, on the basis of the 2011 population census, has fallen below the global threshold, signalling that the country will have to address conservation needs more seriously amid a growing population and an expanding economy. India’s per capita availability has been pegged at 1,545 cubic metre a year, including non-personal consumption, such as irrigation, according to an estimate of the water resources ministry — notches below...

An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

Health is a state of mental, social and physical well-being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity. To achieve this noble objective, India requires health care professionals who are trained in institutions with standardised infrastructure, and the availability of accessible and equitable health care for both the rural and urban populace. Recently, the health sector has been in the news — from the creation of a rural based...

But existing campaign should be built around land, water, forests: activist P.V. Rajagopal Narmada Bachao Andolan leader and Team Anna core committee member Medha Patkar on Tuesday said there was no move to start a parallel anti-corruption movement. She was reacting to a news story inThe Hindu quoting renowned water conservationist Rajendra Singh about the possibility of a new anti-corruption group emerging, following a meeting of water sector workers at the Gandhi...