Power comes through the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong said. For Lekha-Mendha, though, such power seems rooted in bamboo. The village in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli today became the first in India to win the right to grow, harvest and sell bamboo, a key goal of a five-year-old central law which aims to give tribal communities control over some resources of the jungles they live in. “This is a historic day. Bamboo has...

A lot of misinformation has been spread regarding the allotment of farmland plots by the NOIDA authority to Jayant Bhushan and Shanti Bhushan. In this connection it has to be emphasised that:    1. This allotment was not made under any discretionary quota    2. The total price of the property is Rs. 3.67 crores (not Rs. 35 lacs, as has been quoted in many newspapers) plus Rs 9.18 lakhs per annum...

As Madhya Pradesh begins to harvest a bumper wheat crop, the state is finding that measures put in place to ensure that the powerful do not game the system are having the unintended effect of keeping out the most marginalised. In anticipation of a bumper harvest, the MP government announced a Rs 100 bonus that it would pay wheat farmers above the central government-fixed Minimum Support Price of Rs 1,120. "It...

Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee does not own a house, his wife does. He does not even have a car, unlike many of his party colleagues. Bhattacharjee lives in a Rented two-room government flat at Palm Avenue in Ballygunge with his wife and daughter and his bank account shows a meagre Rs 5,000. No other investments. A Spartan life indeed. That is what Bhattacharjee submitted to the Election Commission while filing his...