Land acquisition and involuntary displacement have been the fountainhead of enormous destitution of millions of invisible people since Independence. Generations of those sacrificed for ‘development’ are farmers and farm workers, and many are fragile tribal people and forest gatherers. By coercive displacement and dispossession, governments pauperise its poorest people, and its food-growers, so that the ‘nation’ can prosper and grow. Rage at persisting State injustice of coercive displacement frequently spills onto...

'Civil society' is a special kind of political capacity, not a repository of any special virtue—and it is not more inherently valuable than the state The story of Indian democracy sometimes plays like a soap opera. The latest episode—not the uplifting kind—involves a confrontation between the government and a mysterious something called “civil society”. Can this “civil society” cavalcade in to rescue a flailing Indian democracy—that once-proud system now being abused...

-PTI   Global food prices are expected to be higher in the 2011-20 period compared with the previous decade and this could have a “devastating” impact on the poor in developing countries, an OECD-FAO report has said. “Higher food prices and volatility in commodity markets are here to stay,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a joint report released today. The report ‘OECD-FAO Agriculture...

There’s a bogey of news to show the complementary association of Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev on the issue of corruption and black money. It seems as if both of them are fighting the same battle against the Congress-led regime and supplementing each other in their respective struggles. Both of them have emerged as the most visible faces of the contemporary civil society, pressurising the government to take crucial steps...

It's that time of the year when Kishore Lal Singh's eyes almost involuntarily scan the skies. The monsoons are coming. In the months ahead, for this Bhil farmer growing cotton, maize and soya south of the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh, life will again hang on a knife's edge. If it rains well, his two bighas (about four basketball courts) of cotton will yield 1,000 kg. If not, he will...