DALIT THEOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY — Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways: Edited by Sathianathan Clarke, Deenbandhu Manchala, Philip Vinod Peacock; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 745. Although Christian missionaries of various denominations have been active in India for several centuries, the 1941 Census placed the number of Christians in colonial India at just 1.6 per cent of the population. This clearly indicates that the...

A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...

In 1957, the Communist Party of Kerala became the first democratically elected communist government in Asia. While many in the West feared that this election would help communism spread across South Asia and make Kerala the "Yan'an of India", the Keralite communists' actions were checked by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party's control of the federal coffers. Instead, from within the political bounds of India's divided government, Kerala initiated what has...

Citi Centre of Financial Literacy, housed in the SEWA-promoted Indian School of Microfinance for Women  (ISMW), plans to train children in rural areas to open bank accounts across the country. The centre also plans to teach children the fundamentals of saving and the utilisation of financial resources. It aims to collaborate with the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance for this initiative. "We are planning to build a rural cadre of...

 Adolescent girls from 22 districts of the state will now get Centre’s support to continue education and receive complete nutrition. The Centre has chosen 22 districts from Uttar Pradesh to implement the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent girls (RGSEAG-Sabla). To be formally launched across 200 districts in the country from mid-November, the scheme aims to empower out-of-school girls ¿ by educating them and providing them with nutritional support. The Department...