-The Hindu     The Kerala government has not learnt anything from the Attappady tragedy. Nutrition levels of women and children, most of them tribals, continue to remain dismal in the area At the Agali Community Health Centre in Attappady, Palakkad district, Kerala, Kavitha tends to her four-year-old child lying listlessly on the cot, critically ill. The doctor says the child is severely malnourished. He also says there are eight such infants and children,...

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the Netherlands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...

-The Hindu Manoharpur (Jharkhand): Deep inside the Saranda sal forest, Thalkobad lies at the core of what was a CPI (Maoist) "liberated zone" in Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district along the Odisha border. Thalkobad, along with 24 other villages, was reclaimed by the Indian state after a massive military operation - Operation Anaconda-I in August 2011 to destroy the CPI (Maoist) Eastern Regional Bureau and several training camps inside Saranda. The village...

-Outlook The LARR bill must plug gaps that allow ingress of misery for the affected The UPA's proposed land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement (LARR) bill contains several provisions which seek to improve upon the existing land acquisition law. Anyway, the present law has clearly run its course, with people no longer willing to submit to coercion by the state. The enactment of a new land acquisition law, in order to make...

-The Business Standard Ranchi: Jharkhand could qualify for more funds than the Rs 1,500-crore earmarked as labour budget under MGNREGS, if the state pulled up its socks and honoured deadlines while executing the Centre's flagship scheme this fiscal. The word came from Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh who reviewed the job programme and action plans for Saranda and Sarju areas among other things at the Project Building in Ranchi today. "Of the...