-Down to Earth Jharkhand taps its dam reservoirs and ponds to boost fish production as well as livelihood AFFLUENCE IS not a word one would normally associate with Jharkhand’s Jamukhadi village, which falls in one of India’s 250 most backward districts. But almost all the houses in the village have TV sets, computers and motorbikes. “There were only a few pucca (brick) houses in our village till 2000 when the state was...

-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-Business Standard Roughly 20% of ST households own a television, compared with 39% of SC households Scheduled caste (SC) households are materially better off than scheduled tribe (ST) households, according to the latest census data on asset ownership. Data released on Wednesday showed 38.5 per cent of ST households owned none of the eight assets on which information was collected in 2011, while only 22.6 per cent of SC households owned none...

-The Hindu Atleast 40 faculty members from the IITs at Mumbai, Delhi, Khargapur and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore have, as of Wednesday, signed the petition lambasting Free Basics — a Facebook initiative to offer free access to a few sites—as ‘misleading’and ‘flawed.’ They will be submitting the petition to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday. “Facebook’s ‘free basics’ (sic) proposal is such a lethal combination, having several...