Power comes through the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong said. For Lekha-Mendha, though, such power seems rooted in bamboo. The village in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli today became the first in India to win the right to grow, harvest and sell bamboo, a key goal of a five-year-old central law which aims to give tribal communities control over some resources of the jungles they live in. “This is a historic day. Bamboo has...

The law ministry has prepared a 10-point governance reforms agenda which envisages capping a bureaucrat's term to 20 years and seeks reforms in allocation of mining and land rights. The presentation made to key UPA functionaries, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi , says all new recruitments to central government jobs should be for 20 years and any extension beyond that would depend on the outcome of...

It's that time of the year when Jharkhand celebrates the Sarhul festival. As saal trees sprout new leaves and blossom in leafless forests, tribals troop to the village 'saran sthal' (place to pray) to worship nature. White and red striped flags flutter along a cratered road snaking through Latehar's hilly terrain, from Rajdanda to Barahi. Construction of this road in Latehar's Mahuadanr block, around 120km from Ranchi, began last year. After...

“Consider local bodies' resolutions” Having been tossed between the State and the Centre for the past few months, the question of a forest clearance for Posco project is in the Orissa government's court once again. On Thursday, Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh delayed a final decision on the clearance once again, telling the State that he could not accept its assurance on forest rights act (FRA) implementation as long as it...

Gandhi resorted to some 30 fasts, of which one-third were directed at himself, for ‘atonement’ or self-purification, one-third were directed against the raj and one-third at India’s social mores. A more honest trinity cannot be imagined. The latter two kinds of fasts were meant to make an impact on the ‘other side’; they were part-fasts and part- hunger strikes, part anashan and part bhukh-hartal, though he derived from each a sense...