-Agence France-Presse Nekpur: With both hands holding the basket of human excrement on her head, widowed grandmother Kela walks through a stream of sewage, up a mound of waste and then dumps the filth while cursing. "Nobody even pays us a decent wage!" she spits as she rakes mud and rubbish over her newly deposited pile, one of several she drops in the course of her working day cleaning toilets as a...
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Madhya Pradesh land row: Farmers sit on pyres, threaten mass suicide-Siddharth Ranjan Das and Janaki Fernandes
-NDTV Bhopal: Twenty farmers in Bujbuja village of Katni district in Madhya Pradesh sit every day on funeral pyres, with kerosene and match sticks at arm's reach. This is a relay protest against acquisition of land by the government for a thermal power plant in the area. On Diwali, a woman called Sunia Bai, allegedly set herself on fire after she was threatened by the authorities to give up her land. The...
More »Where whistleblowers are hounded out -Chander Suta Dogra
-The Hindu The trials and tribulations of Ashok Khemka and Sanjiv Chaturvedi expose Haryana’s intolerance of upright bureaucrats When Haryana’s top land registration official, Ashok Khemka, decided to probe Robert Vadra’s land deals in the State, he perhaps never anticipated the kind of animosity that his actions against Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law would generate within the government. Or, maybe he did, but went ahead nevertheless, hoping that a proactive media would...
More »India's public health system has collapsed: Jairam Ramesh
-Agence-France Presse Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that the country's public health system had "collapsed" in a blunt assessment of his government's failure to extend a social safety net for the poor. Mr Ramesh, known as a maverick with often outspoken views, stressed that 70 per cent of spending on health was out of people's own pockets, making it the single most important reason for indebtedness in rural areas. "We all...
More »Delivering food to a billion people -Yoginder K Alagh
-The Hindustan Times India's food problem is bifocal. A fast growing democracy cannot continue to live with any more deaths due to hunger and malnutrition. Simultaneously, it has to resolve the problem of meeting the rapidly rising food needs of a growing economy or what is called food inflation, basically an inability to grow and deliver food adequately and efficiently to meet the rising and diversifying demand. Indians are good demand modelers....
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