Overlooked and ignored, the problem of untouchability continues to be practised and perpetrated in the country. It is a lifetime of misery and humiliation, unimaginable for the relatively privileged but a daily reality for over one-fifth of the country’s 120 crore-plus population, as revealed succinctly in 22 short and easy to view videos under the Article 17 Campaign launched on April 14, 2012 by India Unheard, which claims to be...

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...

In 2010, Andhra Pradesh witnessed a series of suicides. These were not cases of farmers' suicides—a regular occurrence in the state which continues to be in the grip of an agrarian crisis. The victims in these cases happened to be the poorest of the poor; most of them illiterate dalits and adivasis. The first information reports (FIRs) of the police reveal that most of the suicides were due to coercive...

The ICDS' plight is symptomatic of the problems plaguing the Union government's flagship schemes for the poor all over the country.   INDIA may be the only country in the world where we describe the ensuring of the basic socio-economic rights of the people in terms of “flagship schemes” that are seen as the benevolent contribution of governments. One problem with this approach is that the delivery of basic services is...

-The Deccan Chronicle Adivasis of 40 villages in and around the Kawal wildlife sanctuary, which was recently notified as a tiger reserve by the state government, have started passing unanimous resolutions against the reserve. Adivasi leaders argue that notifying a tiger reserve without the consent of local Adivasis was unilateral and against the Panchayat Raj Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA). They are also demanding, in their resolutions, that state government cancel...