-The Times of India   The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) wound up its six-day visit to Gujarat on Monday without meeting any of the voluntary agencies working on tribal rights in the state's eastern belt. NCST chairman Rameshwar Oraon told newspersons that he relied on feedback from "only those NGOs which were suggested by the state government", such as Agha Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) and Sadguru Foundation, both of whom...

A band of tribal women from rebel-hit Jehan village, 125km from the state capital, are keeping their men off liquor since the past one-and-half years. An unlikely crusader leads rural homemakers, numbering about 60, under the self-named outfit Nehru Mahila Samiti. She’s a 29-year-old primary schoolteacher, Basanti Tirkey, a Ranchi’s Nirmala College alumnus from the batch of 2004. The mother of a three-year-old son, her husband Antonis Lakra works in the...

Most of the residents of Ambadipa are farmers and almost all their monthly earnings are less than Rs 2,000. But that did not stop them from bringing technology to their village for their children. All the residents of this little hamlet tucked away in a Dooars block had contributed to buy the only computer that Ambadipa now boasts of. “It was difficult for us to pay, but we did it. All the...

Six ponds with abundant fish, six wells, three canals, enough vegetables and paddy to feed all. Bera, a remote village in Naxalite-hit Bundu block, about 50km from Ranchi district, got enough food for thought to come out of the rebel shadow and taste self-sufficiency, thanks to the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations. The village — which today hosted a high profile visitor, the country director of WFP Mihoko Tamamura...

The Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad today “took back” land that was being used by a Siliguri-based planter as a small tea garden for the past five years, alleging that he had duped the Adivasi owners. The Jalpaiguri administration has termed the “takeover” illegal. “Who gave them the rights or the responsibility of reclaiming tribal land? There is an administration and government procedure for everything. They should have come to us...