-The Hindustan Times Lakshmanpur Bathe: Lakshman Rajvanshi has a question for the Patna high court: "Did we murder our own families, including kids not even two months old?" A landless labourer from Lakshmanpur Bathe in Arwal district of Bihar, Rajvanshi was reacting to the court acquitting 26 upper caste persons accused of massacring 58 Dalits, including 27 women and 10 children, while he stood terror-struck behind a wall on December 1, 1997. Rajvanshi...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Much work remains to be done if the new Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act has to mark a meaningful shift for India's adivasi communities. Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) is a multimedia journalist and researcher, and currently with the Publics and Policies program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Among the worst excesses committed in India's six decade-old democracy, the forcible displacment...

-The Hindu Poverty takes a huge toll on the mind and on this World Mental Health Day, the focus should be on the well-being offered by community-based alternative approaches In recent years, the impact of mental illness on the social and economic health of nations has been well understood, placing mental ill health as one of the leading causes of disability adjusted life years (DALY) worldwide. There has been much focus on...

-The Hindu With the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act coming into effect in 1972, India conveyed a strong message that it cared for the health of pregnant women who wanted to safely terminate their pregnancies. Yet, even four decades later, many women are still unaware that abortion is legal. Even access to safe abortion centres is severely restricted, especially in rural areas. As a result, there is a great...