-IPS News GUNTUR, India: Thirty-seven-year-old Kode Sujatha stands in front of a hut with a palm-thatched roof, surrounded by a group of men shouting angrily and jostling one another for a spot at the front of the crowd. Each of the boatmen, who carry sand mined from a nearby river to the shore every day, wants to be paid before the others.   Sujatha stares hard at them, holds up a piece of paper...

-The Hindustan Times The skyrocketing prices of onions, a key ingredient used in making dishes ranging from curries to biryanis, reflects India’s inability to insulate staples from weather-induced supply disturbances. On Thursday onions traded at Rs 4,900 a quintal (or Rs 49 a kg) at Lasalgaon in Maharashtra, India’s largest wholesale market for the crop. Inadequate supplies have pushed up prices sharply over the last few weeks. Already, retail onion prices have...

-The Hindu The ‘development’ discourse serves the same purpose as the colonial apparatus but without the bad press. After 67 years of failing to eliminate deprivation in India, is it time to look for new ideas? The Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011, which hit the headlines earlier this month, tells us that half the households in rural India are landless, dependant on casual manual labour, and live in deprivation. By suggesting...

-The Hindu Urban planning that involves the people and alternative service providers gives far better results than top-down efforts from the government, finds an IIT-M study In Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, the responsibility of managing and maintaining a set of more than 160 community toilets was handed over by the Tiruchirapalli City Corporation to a federation of women self-help groups. A post-programme field survey of 803 households revealed that the community participation had...

-IPSNews.net NEW DELHI: Chottey Lal, 43, a daily wage labourer at a construction site in NOIDA, a township in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is a beleaguered man. After a gruelling 12-hour daily shift at the dusty location, he and his wife Subha make barely enough to feed a family of seven. Nor is the couple ever able to procure the subsidized rations they are legally entitled to, under a...