Sixteen persons were sentenced to death by a Bihar court on Wednesday for their involvement in the Jehanabad carnage of 1997, in which 58 unarmed Dalits were massacred by the Ranbir Sena, a private militia of landlords. Ten others were sentenced to life term and were also slapped with a fine of Rs.31,000 each by Additional District Judge Vijay Prakash Mishra. Fifty-eight Dalits, including 27 women and 16 children, were gunned down...

A meticulously researched book by A. Vaidyanathan, Agricultural Growth in India: Role of Technology, Incentives and Institutions, is an illuminating scholarly work. Thinking about it one realizes the dismal and declining state of Indian agriculture and the poor governance at both Central and state government levels that has brought it to this sorry pass. A valuable compendium of data and analysis of Indian agriculture since Independence, it is a valuable...

Increased representation for women can unleash a broader process that can be set in motion by the strength of sheer numbers. One measure of whether it is important to have women in important policy formulation roles is to examine how a largely male-dominated system of government has served women. It turns out that India performs very poorly in this regard. Despite a few heartening examples to the contrary, in general Indian...

Rural Development Minister C P Joshi today said only 65 lakh households had got 100 days employment under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme though 10 crore people had got job cards when the programme was launched.   "When NREGA was launched 10 crore people got job cards. Of these, 4.6 crore got work. But only 65 lakh households availed of 100 days work," Joshi said.   He was speaking at...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...