Conservation measures have taken away the traditional livelihoods of nomadic tribes in Karnataka. AT a short distance from the world famous monuments at Hampi is the village of Hulihaidar in the fertile region of the “rice bowl of Karnataka” in Gangavathi taluk in Koppal district. Local residents say it was an important town in the Vijayanagara empire (1336-1646 C.E.) and the seat of a local lord. Today it is home to...

Jeeja Ghosh, the disability activist who was forced off a Goa-bound flight because she suffers from cerebral palsy, joins a long list of passengers who have faced such humiliation. “What happened to Jeeja isn’t something new. For every Jeeja case that gets reported in the media, there are 10-15 others that don’t get reported. It is only through heavy fines and exemplary punishment that one can ensure that these incidents are...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

If the combined Opposition had sat down for weeks so as to find an issue to embarrass the UPA Government and make it a laughing stock before the whole country, they could not have thought of a better issue than the free gift presented to it by the UPA Government by initially insisting that it had irrevocably decided to allow the entry of multi-brand retail leader superstores like Walmart, USA...

Valley’s youth say peaceful political protests are the most effective means for achieving political aspirations. Estrangement from India is matched by the lack of interest in Pakistan In 2010 the Ministry of Home Affairs had commissioned a focussed survey on the priorities and aspirations of Kashmir’s new generation, which had spearheaded the long spell of unrest, and found that 54 per cent of them identified “Azadi” as their preferred “final status...