There is a new “plan” for the scheduled tribes, but the adivasis themselves will have no say. Alienation from the forest and its resources, alienation from cultivable land and alienation from the State underlie the anger of the adivasis in India’s heartland. This is not a new or startling observation. Adivasi mass organisations, the more sensitive administrators, political organisations with their ears to the ground and scholars who have studied India’s...

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...

The rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth. Although we may not have yet reached “the end of history,” globalisation has brought us closer to “the end of geography” as we have known it. The compression of time and space triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution —roughly, since 1980 — has changed our interactions with...

The National Advisory Council's recommendations on the National Food Security Bill are in danger of being brushed aside. It is the fate of most advisory committees that the government accepts whatever advice suits its purposes and ignores the rest. The first version of the National Advisory Council (NAC-1) managed to avoid that fate to some extent, due to favourable circumstances. NAC-1 was able to persuade the government to enact the...

The Chhattisgarh model offers some key lessons on how to make the public distribution system deliverProbably the only thing extraordinary about Manglu is that he is the perfect example of an ordinary tribal. The 60-year-old belongs to the Pahadi Korba tribe and lives in Govindpur village of Sarguja district of Chhattisgarh. He best represents what modern India calls a below poverty line (BPL) beneficiary of various government schemes. Manglu earns...