The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

Chhattisgarh announced a proposed investment of more than Rs 1,77,000 crore in the state. Until October 2008, it had signed over a hundred mous with companies like Jindals, Tata Steel and Essar. After a couple of months of this announcement, a bureaucrat heading the state environment regulatory body resigned. “Development is the preferred option, provided the carrying capacity is available. There cannot be a trade-off at the cost of the health...

The United Nations Development Programme-sponsored 2009 Human Development Report on migration, “Overcoming Barriers: Human mobility and Development” has been widely acknowledged as a path-breaking study on human movement. Shattering the many myths around migration, the report concludes that most migration is in fact beneficial, and calls for supporting policies to ease barriers to free movement. Senior Assistant Country Director, UNDP, K. Seeta Prabhu. discusses the report with The Hindu For...

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial energy use to...

Women currently make up around half of the world’s migrant population, even without taking into consideration short-term and seasonal movements. Despite the widespread prevalence of female migration, there are still some common stereotypes about its nature: that it is mostly women and girls accompanying their male heads of household, or dominantly by young, unmarried women, mostly for marriage or for some defined work enabled by contractors. Yet the migration of...