Failure of crops due to continuing dry season spells doom in agency The damning trend of farmer suicides seems to have arrived even in the agency areas of Adilabad district following the failure of cotton crop this season. As many as six of the 13 cotton farmers to have committed suicide since August 29 belong to the Banjara and Gond tribes. This is the first time when so many suicides among tribal...

Chikkamade Gowda had once told the Centre to give him poison. It was better than being evicted from his forest habitat. That was in 1974. Thirty-seven years on, the Soliga tribal and some 16,500 fellow sufferers are celebrating their homecoming, thanks to a landmark central amendment. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2008, allows them to use nearly 60 per cent of their ancestral land,...

With tribals accounting for about 14 per cent of the total population in the state, the Congress party is organising a one-day conclave at Kevadia Colony in the tribal-dominated Narmada district on October 15 to discuss the issues of interest to them. Aimed at wooing the tribal heartland for 2012 assembly elections, the party has decided to focus mainly on the issue of allotment of forest land. The issue of forest...

The 12th Plan Approach Paper looks upon land more as raw material for mining and industrialisation than as a source of livelihood for the poor. DESPITE a fast economic growth, more than 60 per cent of the population of India is still dependent on land. The 12th Plan Approach Paper, however, looks upon land not as a source of livelihood for the poor but as raw material for mining and industrialisation....

-The Economic Times   The Orissa High Court on Friday stayed the acquisition of land for building the much-delayed 12-million tonne Posco project, dealing a further setback to the India plans of the South Korean steel major which has not been able to progress much for the past five years. In a ruling on Friday, the high court ordered status quo on the private land being acquired by the state government that...