Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

-IANS   Mahesh Sharma is a happy man. A farmer in Naubatpur near Patna, he was pushed into near Destitution after facing two consecutive years of drought. But with showers lashing Patna and many parts of Bihar for the past few days, the rain gods have given him the Indian farmers' staple diet - hope. "Rains are like gold for us. We welcomed the showers by preparing a sweet-dish. Unlike the last...

Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous Destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow. Rage at persisting State injustice of coercive displacement frequently spills onto...

In the wake of mass protest by locals against land acquisition process The Union government on Sunday asked the Orissa government not to take precipitate action in the wake of a mass protest by locals against the land acquisition process launched at Govindpur village for the Posco steel plant. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in a statement that coercion was not the way to resolve the crisis. He hoped that the Orissa...

The farmers' struggle against land acquisition only shows that from passive forms of protest they have turned to active forms of resistance. THE recent agitation by farmers in Uttar Pradesh against cropland acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is only the latest in a long series of protests by farmers and rural communities, which started a decade ago in different parts of the country and which gathered momentum over the past five...