-The Indian Express The Rural Development Ministry has washed its hands of the matter while the RGI too seems reluctant to claim ownership. Amid growing demands to release the caste figures compiled as part of the Socio Economic and Caste Census, various government authorities having been passing the buck to one another. Officials have been saying the caste data, compiled from the first such census since 1931, is part of a...

There is some positive news about national progress in sanitation and drinking water. A newly released report from UNICEF and WHO informs us that the country has witnessed 31 percent reduction in open defecation since 1990. This means 394 million Indians no more defecate in the open. The bad news, however, is that the progress in ‘population not practising open defecation’ among the poorest has been slower during the last 20...

-The Indian Express   Socio-economic census data provides valuable pointers — and reality checks — for policymakers    The socio-economic and caste census (SECC) 2011 paints a picture of rural India weighed down by landlessness and lack of non-farm jobs. More than 60 per cent of the 17.91 crore rural households covered under the census qualified as deprived on 14 parameters. This is a set of people who do not own a two-wheeler...

-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...

Samata started working in a small tribal hamlet in 1987 with a group of tribal and rural youth, to mobilize tribal communities against exploitation by outsiders and by government. Samata was formally registered as a non government organization in 1990. Samata operates across a broad spectrum of action, from organizing grassroots campaigns in the communities of north coastal Andhra Pradesh to creating international support networks of human rights and indigenous...