-Mid Day Mumbai: He has literally made waste fruitful. Kamlakar Sukhad Urhade, a tribal youth from Girgaon Bhujad Pada village in Talasari taluka has made a water pump out of discarded waste material. Urhade lost his father soon after he completed his education, and the responsibility of looking after his mother and two brothers fell on him. The family’s 5-6 acres of land yields rice, but only during the rainy season....

-New York Times Blog There’s poor, and then there’s ultrapoor. The ultrapoor are almost always women and largely found in Africa, South Asia and to a lesser extent, parts of Latin America. They are most often rural. They work as maids or field laborers, often paid not with wages but in food scraps. They might have just one dress or sari, and must wash a part of it at a time...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com Kasargod: In 2000, Pidamale Govinda Bhat, 63, a middle-class areca nut farmer, rigged up an experimental check dam with sand and plastic sheets. For decades, his family had been constructing a temporary check dam across the Okkethoor River with stones and soil to irrigate their farm. “The government constructed a vented dam for us in place of our temporary check dam,” recalls Bhat. “But the sarkari dam leaked and leaked. By...

-NDTV Gholgagon, Madhya Pradesh: Twenty protestors, from Gholgagon village along the Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh, have been standing in waist-deep water for the last 25 days. The soles of their feet are completely stripped of skin and are infected with fungal sores. "Our health condition is deteriorating, epidermal skin from the soles of our feet is peeling. This has made standing and walking very difficult," says 63-year-old Sakku Bai, who's been...

-The Hindu The Environment Minister insists on clearing all hydro projects, even when the government itself earlier agreed that the Himalayas must be avoided for development work. A battle of epic proportions between the hydroelectric power companies and the people of Uttarakhand has now culminated with the struggle shifting to the office of the Prime Minister of India. It began with the extraordinary and far-sighted 2014 decision of the Supreme Court in...