-TheWire.in Promises made are hardly kept and the responsibility to maintain basic public amenities such as toilets, sewage and clean water facilities falls on the slum-dwellers themselves. This article comes from a study undertaken as part of a Centre for New Economic Studies (CNES) Visual Storyboard Initiative. The three-part photo essay on this storyboard can be accessed through the following links (Part I; Part II; Part III) and all video essays uploaded...

-The Hindu A gut-wrenching story of the poor and marginalised who work and live at Mumbai’s Deonar landfill to earn their daily bread Rag pickers live off what the rest of the world throws away. They lead invisible lives in the landfills that keep growing, stagnating and putrefying with items discarded by the city’s rich. The Dark trail of modern life is seen and felt everywhere. Journalist Saumya Roy, who spent eight years...

-Article-14.com In driving out ‘illegal encroachers’ from farms in an area smaller than Assam’s capital for an agriculture project that does not interest native Assamese, the Bharatiya Janata Party government is dispossessing productive Bengali Muslim farmers, many of whom say they bought land from locals and have been paying land taxes, some for up to 70 years. Darrang, Assam: On the day Moinul Haque, 28, was shot in the abdomen and killed...

-The Telegraph APCR reproduced an account that sheds more on the ugly backdrop to the police firing and atrocity that followed A delegation of rights defenders who visited Assam’s Darrang district, where a day labourer and a child were killed in a land reclamation drive in a minority-dominated settlement last month, has reconstructed a grim picture of the government and private groups creating a situation that culminated in the police firing. The fact-finding...

-Scroll.in The community feels the recent evictions are about communal politics, not land. Assamese Muslims agree. Manikajan Bibi is scared of losing her home. It is one windowless room built with tin sheets held together by wooden beams. In nervous anticipation, she has bundled this season’s harvest of rice into two sacks, her sarees in a fraying mud brown rexine bag. A rusty trunk holds everything else – mostly a bunch of...