-The Hindu We won’t allow anyone to cut our trees, say the women of Balarampur village For three generations now, and spanning 40 years, Chaturi Sahu, 70, has been unfailingly sending one male member from her family to patrol the nearby Jhinkargadi forest to ensure that its trees and shrubs are untouched. Year after year, her father-in-law, husband and son, who are part of the foot soldiers of Balarampur, a nondescript village in...

-The Indian Express Farmers say CM promised Rs 2,500 per tonne, but factories paying only Rs 700; govt orders probe. Bengaluru: On June 24, Ningegowda, 61, a differently abled sugarcane farmer from Mandya in south Karnataka, turned the standing sugarcane crop in his 18 gunta field (1 acre = 40 guntas) into his Funeral Pyre. Till then, only one other farmer’s suicide had been reported from the region since April this...

-IPS News NAYAGARH (IPS): Kama Pradhan, a 35-year-old tribal woman, her eyes intent on the glowing screen of a hand-held GPS device, moves quickly between the trees. Ahead of her, a group of men hastens to clear away the brambles from stone pillars that stand at scattered intervals throughout this dense forest in the Nayagarh district of India’s eastern Odisha state. The heavy stone markers, laid down by the British 150 years...

-The Telegraph Jaipur: Death owes this to the living. In this desert state, it is once more the great leveller. It needed a prod from a blindfolded lady with scales, but social workers say it's a big step forward towards ending years of caste-based discrimination that did not even spare the dead. Maybe, not much longer. Here's the story. The Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) has "removed" signposts and covered boards at crematoriums that marked...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing Funeral Pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...