Neither celebrity nor politician, Sita Murmu, is extraordinary because she is the great survivor of that `other India'. She is not a beneficiary of the job guarantee scheme MGNREGA and doesn't have a BPL card. In her 60s, she lives in a Bhubaneswar slum and describes herself as a tribal widow without any land, regular income or schooling but "surviving —that itself is enough". Railing at the false promises of...

Several newspapers and TV channels, some of them among India’s biggest, have claimed credit for exposing the Adarsh society scam in which the who’s who of India’s defense and political establishment are involved. The scam exposes the nexus between bureaucrats, politicians and unscrupulous defense service officers. Obviously it wouldn’t be anyone’s ‘exclusive’ if so many newspapers and channels broke the news. Or else there would be one journalist who reported...

Off With Their Rights...     * As many as 3 lakh slum dwellers in Delhi were evicted before the Commonwealth Games     * When a family is evicted, each member loses many rights—the rights to livelihood, shelter, health, education etc     * Of some 60,000 beggars on Delhi streets, more than 50,000 were removed for the Games *** Forget the razzle-dazzle and the hype over the recently concluded Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Delhi. The human...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

He came, he spoke, and he got 54,000 jobs. This was on Day One of his India visit. By the time he flies out of New Delhi on November 9, US President Barack Obama would have charmed his way through to force open Indian agriculture to American corporations . And therein hangs the fate of millions of small and marginal farmers. Top on the agenda is the push to make Prime...