Returning home from work recently, farmer Baidhar Singh was aghast to find his thatched hut in Balasore district, Orissa trampled to the ground. Just a few hundred metres away stood the culprits, huge and grey against the darkening sky: a herd of 65 wild elephants. That was a few weeks ago. Up till now, Singh and his wife are still calling a polythene-covered lean-to home. Singh’s experience has become quite common in...

Stunned villagers are finding that governments have been leasing land, often for decades. The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya's leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave. “They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our...

At its core, healthcare is essentially a public service. So its demand and supply cannot be left to the market and can't be limited to care rendered or financed by public expenditure, but must also include incentives and disincentives for care paid for by citizens. India's healthcare challenges are aggravated by lack of overall coverage of health insurance services. Although the government and some private employers provide health protection, the...

Sustainable and resilient cities should be focus of urban development An international conference here on Wednesday called for making the Indian cities “resilient” in the backdrop of climate change and taking care of the urban poor. “The urban poor are the most vulnerable to current climate variability such as regular floods and water shortage. Sustainable and resilient cities should be the focus of urban development,” D.B. Raju, executive vice-president (special initiatives),...

The Chhattisgarh model offers some key lessons on how to make the public distribution system deliverProbably the only thing extraordinary about Manglu is that he is the perfect example of an ordinary tribal. The 60-year-old belongs to the Pahadi Korba tribe and lives in Govindpur village of Sarguja district of Chhattisgarh. He best represents what modern India calls a below poverty line (BPL) beneficiary of various government schemes. Manglu earns...