IN PATNI, a remote village in Satna district of Madhya Pradesh, sevenmonth- old Sandeep is playing in the mud. He finds a pumpkin seed in the dust and promptly puts it into his mouth. A tiny piece of cow dung, a pebble, a fallen leaf and finally the sole of a rubber slipper follow the pumpkin seed. For Sandeep and the children in the 300- odd families in the village,...

Despite numerous special schemes and financial allocations, tribal communities in Hunsur taluk lead a life of poverty, marked by severe malnutrition. In Bettada haadi in the taluk, tribal residents grapple with appalling health conditions. Eight people in 28 families have tuberculosis, five have died in the past six years, and many others are malnourished and anaemic. They live in dilapidated houses that lack sanitation. Defunct borewells, broken pipes and non-functional streetlights...

INSIDE his hovel of branches and rags, a grizzled pauper called Badshah Kale keeps a precious object. It is a note, scrawled by a policeman and framed by Mr Kale, proclaiming that he “is not a thief”. For members of his Pardhi tribe, who are among some 60m Indians considered criminal by tradition, this is treasure. Squatting beside Mr Kale, on a turd-strewn wasteland outside Ashti, a village in India’s western...

How did your trip to Niyamgiri and Vedanta’s mining project there come about? I’ve been a human rights, social justice and environment protection advocate for the last 30 years. I am the founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. I also love India and have a long relationship with this country. Many people know this. This is why Action Aid approached me to meet Sitaram Kulisika, a tribal...

THE FLAGSHIP scheme of UPA II, the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA), has become a policymaker’s nightmare. If suggestions by the Finance Ministry (reportedly at the instance of Congress President Sonia Gandhi) and the state governments are incorporated, the yearly food grain requirement would be close to 80 million tonnes. But considering food grain procurement in an average year is 40 to 41 million tonnes — half the amount...