The National Advisory Council will ask the Centre to focus the ongoing socio-economic caste census on enumerating and classifying denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, or DNTs. The plan is to give these groups priority while issuing unique identity cards and introducing laws that will grant them explicit recognition on the lines of the 1992 statute on minorities. The NAC said special directives must be issued to the housing and urban poverty alleviation...

Clinging on to their cultural moorings are monks from Assam's Majuli islands who were forced to relocate in the 1970s With land swallowed by the Brahmaputra, many monasteries of Assam's Majuli island were relocated to the mainland in the Seventies. The lives of the monks have never been the same. Indrakanta Mahanta, the head of the Vaishnava sattra (monastery), Bogi Ai, can't remember when somebody last asked him about Majuli. And there...

-The Times of India   YAVATMAL: Information released under right to information (RTI) has revealed that the state government has paid Rs 2.83 crore to acquire land distributed to tribals and landless labourers under the Bhoodan movement to rehabilitate Pahur villagers displaced due to Bembla River Irrigation Project. Concerns are now being expressed that some government officials pocketed this compensation along with five land owners by forging documents and sale deeds. Sarpanch Ainuddin...

The few villages in Adilabad district that remain difficult to access even now are the ones that give a ray of hope where health is concerned in the agency areas here. Much of tribal traditions with respect to agriculture and food habits can be seen in original form in these habitations as they were left untouched by developments elsewhere. Seasonal and viral diseases account for death of scores of tribal people...

PUNE: The cotton export debacle has created an oversupply of Bt seeds in the market with angry farmers expected to plant less area in the coming summer season. Companies are bracing for a price war in branded cotton seed, a far cry from the usual scenario where state governments impose a ceiling on maximum retail prices. Cotton is India's most important farm-produced industrial raw material and contributes a third to the...