Latehar, Hazaribagh and Gumla in Jharkhand, Bastar in Chhattisgarh, Chandrapur in Maharashtra, the Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya… the list goes on. These are all districts in India where mining companies are locked in a battle with the local population over the mining rights in these regions. Other than fighting mining companies, there are two factors common to all these regions. One, they have fertile land and dense forests. Two, indigenous tribes...

They narrate their accounts of pain and humiliation “We will never again go back to that life of shame and indignity” Provide quota for community in higher education: Aruna Roy The capital's Constitution Club resounded on Monday to cries of “Jai Bhim” as a huge gathering of former manual scavengers rose as one to demand an apology from the government for the wrongs done to the community. “Apologise now for the violation of...

The centre has asked the states to strengthen their public distribution systems (PDS) to minimise the impact of high inflation on the poor, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said here Monday. 'The central government has requested the states to strengthen their public distribution systems to ensure that the vulnerable groups of the society are not adversely affected by the current level of inflation,' Mukherjee said at the second annual conference of finance...

In its technology statement, Aadhaar, the massive Government of India project that seeks to enrol citizens, puts on record its commitment to using open technological standards. However, the government of Kerala — the only State that mandates the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in governance — recently found that the client enrolment software used is only compatible with Windows, the proprietary operating system owned by Microsoft. The Unique...

The pattern of land distribution has rendered rural landscape of UP disfavourable for farming. The precursor for this is the fragmentation of cultivable land into a large number of `small landholdings'. The process set under the demographic pressure, has caused marginalisation of a vast majority of farmers and posed a severe challenge to the prospects of rural economy and the growth of agriculture in future. Going by the official figure, UP...