The National Advisory Council chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi today said the Forest Rights Act (FRA) needed strengthening and the Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Work Place Bill, 2010, must be extended to domestic workers. It also discussed how to push its views on the proposed National Food Security Bill, apart from deciding to examine the working of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. Aat a meeting today...

Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children. "There were no libraries, no laboratories and no computer classes. In fact, most of the schools in Mukteshwar [which is in the Nainital district of northern Uttarakhand state] had no...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

The rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth. Although we may not have yet reached “the end of history,” globalisation has brought us closer to “the end of geography” as we have known it. The compression of time and space triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution —roughly, since 1980 — has changed our interactions with...

In the end, Gangula Tadangi succumbed to tuberculosis. The Kondh Adivasi’s life could have been saved if he had made it to the hospital on time. But he was in judicial custody at Koraput district jail in southern Odisha for allegedly “waging war against the Indian State”. During his last moments, Tadangi, 25, is said to have whispered something in Kondh. But nobody could make out anything because no one...