-Outlook As the Manmohan Singh government makes evident its unfriendliness to villages, the nation hurtles towards disaster. It's a danger no one wants to face. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been trying for years to make us believe that agriculture is a vast marshland in which a huge population is stuck ankle- to neck-deep and it is his duty to rescue them. "Our salvation lies in moving people out of agriculture," he...

-The Times of India New Delhi: The capital's growth in the last decade has overwhelmingly come from the city swallowing up rural areas, newly released census data shows. The number of census towns-essentially newly urbanized villages in the laldora areas-nearly doubled over the last decade, taking the proportion of Delhi's residents who live in these areas to an unprecedented third of the population. Varsha Joshi, director of census operations for Delhi, released...

-The Hindu Attempt to question practices invites wrath of dominant Caste Madurai: Multiple forms of discrimination exist in Vadugapatti village near Usilampatti, where a 12 year-old- Dalit boy was made to carry his footwear on his head recently. Dalits can neither walk on the streets of Caste Hindus with their footwear on nor can they enter common pathways on bicycles. If they violated the rule they had to face the wrath of the...

-PTI New Delhi: The sex ratio in Delhi has shown an improvement with the female population being grown by 24.9 per cent while the male population grew at a lesser rate of 18.1 per cent. According to the Primary Census Abstract 2011 released here on Tuesday, of the overall 21.2 per cent population growth registered during 2001-2011, female population grew by 24.9 per cent while male population grew at 18.1 per...

-The World Bank blog "Five years ago, I was no one," said Kunti Devi to me, sitting up straight against the wall of her one-room mud hut in Bara, a small village in India's eastern state of Bihar. "Now, people know me by my own name, not just by the name of my children." I was sitting on the floor, across from Devi, a mother of eight, who belonged to one of...