Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

The 2010 Seeds Bill that has been introduced in Parliament does address some of the major concerns in the aborted 2004 version, but strangely a number of important correctives – on regulation, consistency and punishment – that had been incorporated in the 2008 version (which lapsed in 2009) have now been modified or dropped altogether. What forces are pushing the government to act against the interests of India’s farmers? The third...

Citing violation of a host of environmental laws, a government-appointed expert panel has recommended that Vedanta Resources should not be allowed to go ahead with its proposed bauxite mining project in the Niyamgiri hills area of Kalahandi and Rayagada districts in Orissa. A decision on this will be taken by the Ministry of Environment and Forests later this month. The expert panel, headed by Naresh C Saxena, a retired IAS officer who...

Tribal affairs minister Kanti Lal Bhuria has written to environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh that the committee the latter set up under National Advisory Council member, N C Saxena, is going beyond its purview to tell how the Forest Rights Act should be implemented. He has demanded that the committee should stick to looking at the role of the forest department in view of the Act. The letter, setting...

Complexity and unsolved problems are at the very heart of the sustainability challenge, and at the very heart of M.S. Swaminathan's thinking and essays. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus offered the piercing insight that geometric population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, leaving society destitute and hungry. Since that time, our optimism of beating the “Malthusian curse” has waxed and waned. Few people in modern history have done more to help...