-The Hindu Unlike the rest of the world, India is stridently moving away from community-involved conservation models In February this year, one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries issued a court order which stood to evict more than a million forest-dwelling people from their homes. More damningly, India, a state that supports about 8% of global species diversity and over 100 million forest-dwellers, did not even put up a legal defence before...

-Down to Earth India's villages miss a golden chance to become drought-proof as more MGNREGA projects grind to a halt Almost half of India is currently under drought; for many districts this is the second-consecutive drought. Given this, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should have been the key scheme to not only mitigate impacts of drought but also employ people in distress for earning. But an analysis of...

-The Telegraph Rahul cited Sreedhanya’s achievement in Wayanad as evidence that the job scheme was working and took a dig at Narendra Modi Kalpetta (Kerala): The first tribal woman from Kerala to qualify for the IAS told Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday that her parents were beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Sreedhanya Suresh said her parents had educated their two children with the money they earned from the rural...

-The Indian Express Rural crisis needs nuanced interventions, not tall promises in party manifestos Farmers were sold a dream in 2014 that everything was going to change. But now they have compelling reasons to feel they were deceived. Party manifestos indicate what the politicians want us to believe. After elections, winners get either selective amnesia (Rs 15 lakh in each bank account), re-interpret promises (MSP at C2+50 per cent), continue to...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The so-called mohalla clinics, or neighbourhood health centres, are an important part of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s electoral campaign. AAP had promised 1,000 across Delhi, but opened just 189 till December last year, attributing the failure to start the rest to bureaucratic hurdles. TOI visited eight mohalla clinics in north, east and central Delhi to find that while patients were mostly satisfied with the...