Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...

“Wherever there is a lamp, there is darkness below it,” said Bava Bhalekar, a fisherman and local leader in this village roughly a hundred miles south of Mumbai. “The tragedy is that while our village has this project, we ourselves don’t have electricity.” “This project” is the power plant that Enron built. A decade after Enron withdrew from the project, the Indian government and two Indian companies are promising to...

Caste is feudal, the market free and equal. Correct? Ask Ratan Lal Sirswal or Deepak Jatav. Sirswal, 75, had started off as a sweeper but is now one of the oldest businessmen in Panipat, Haryana. He quit his sweeper’s job once his handloom unit was on its feet. His success, he says, came largely because he hid the fact that he was born a Valmiki Dalit. Customers who discovered his caste origins...

Bhisham Singh Yadav, father of the groom, is stressed. His rented Lexus got stuck behind a bullock cart. He has hired a truck to blast Hindi pop, but it is too big to maneuver through his village. At least his grandest gesture, evidence of his upward mobility, is circling overhead. The helicopter has arrived. Mr. Yadav, a wheat farmer, has never flown, nor has anyone else in the family. And...

The Gender Hygiene Programme is attempting to change attitude towards menstrual hygiene It involves SHGs manufacturing inexpensive sanitary towels from cotton and tissue paper When women in rural areas are asked to spend Rs.15 on a packet of nine sanitary napkins, they respond by saying they would rather continue to use rags and spend the money on their husbands or children. But the Gender Hygiene Programme (GHP) launched here three years ago is...