-The Telegraph Call to colleges to take urgent action Two health networks on Tuesday called on medical education institutions to take steps to protect their students from caste-based discrimination that allegedly led a young doctor to commit suicide in Mumbai on May 22. The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA) and the Medico Friends Circle (MFC) have labelled the suicide of Payal Tadvi, a doctor from an adivasi community pursuing postgraduate studies in gynaecology at...

-Newslaundry.com The election season seems to have skipped adivasis in the state that has recorded 19 deaths from starvation since 2017. On New Year’s Eve, Baghiya Birijiya lost her mother Budhni Birijiyan to hunger, cold, and extreme poverty in Latehar, one of India’s poorest districts. The family had so few means that they could not cremate the 80-year-old’s body for two days, until public pressure led the administration to intervene to provide...

-The Hindu It is shocking that a democratic government is seeking to strengthen the colonial-era Indian Forest Act The Indian Forest Act, 1927 was a remarkable piece of expropriation in the name of conservation. The British government carried out one of the largest land expropriations in history, where the rights to occupy and use forests were transferred from communities with customary and historical property rights to the colonial Central government. The act...

-Newsclick.in In the recently held 2018 Assembly elections, out of 48 tribal dominated seats BJP only won 16 while in 2013, the party had 34. Bhopal / Burhanpur: Demanding to uphold the Forest Rights Act 2006 (FRA) and withdrawal of the proposed amendment in Indian Forests Act 1927 by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, thousands of tribals carried out an ‘adivasi Adhikar Chetavni rally’ in Madhya Pradesh’s Burhanpur district...

-TheWire.in Mid-day meal cooks in Bihar – mostly women from Dalit and adivasi communities – are subject to the worst kind of institutional gender discrimination. Patna/Jehanabad/Bhojpur (Bihar): On February 11, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi served the third billionth Akshay Patra mid-day meal in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, he said that his “government has given special focus on the nutrition of the children because a healthy childhood is the foundation of New India”. “Modiji...