In Danta village, 15km from Bhilwara city, 30-odd women start filing in at 8.30 am daily to resume work on building a concrete water reservoir. The women are among the 2,000 people in the village who have got work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) since the scheme, promising 100 days of work a year to one adult member of every rural family, was launched two years ago...

80 % construction complete, but only 3 % rehabilitation has been done  The Environment Ministry has issued a show cause notice to the company building the Maheshwar Dam in the Narmada Valley after hundreds of affected people marched to the Ministry demanding rehabilitation. According to the notice, if the company cannot explain why 80 per cent of construction is over even while rehabilitation efforts lag behind, the project could be...

In 1960, when I was enrolled for my MA at the Delhi School of Economics, the shining star at the School was certainly K.N. Raj. The founder of the School, V.K.R.V. Rao, had left the institution, but came back every Founders’ Day to remind us of its glorious past and of the enduring values it embodied. Raj’s style was much lower key, but it soon became clear that his dedication...

Another food crisis? This time it’s not shortages but prices—a plain failure of responsive policy and execution. Zooming food prices are raising political temperatures yet again. The rumblings, for once, are not merely restricted to the opposition parties, but evident within the ruling coalition as well. Though attacks from across the political spectrum have become a bit subdued of late, the target remains Union agriculture and food minister Sharad Pawar. And...

Three years ago, Donel Ajai Courtney came to Bastar for the first time as a tourist after his mother told him about the tribal heartland in Chhattisgarh. Now this 33-year-old lawyer in the United States runs a ‘Dhurwa patasala’, a unique school that aims to protect and revive the tribal Dhurwa dialect and the community’s fading culture and traditions. Every Sunday afternoon, more than 35 children and a few elders...