In Vijaypura village, marginalised women, especially widows, have used the RTI tool to procure food grains under PDS and are living a healthy life. The movement, instigated by a young RTI activist, boasts of achieving the millennium goal of reducing hunger by half in the region. It was from the state of Rajasthan that the Right to Information (RTI) movement emerged as an idea that went on to capture national...

A hillock is strewn with empty bottles of whisky and sticks — remnants of what tribals allege was a 48-hour torture session by drunk BSF men. The enraged people of Panchangi village have accused the paramilitary force, along with Chhattisgarh police, of brutally beating nearly 40 men. Two teenage girls have also alleged that they were sexually molested. One of them says she was stripped, while another provided a detailed...

Farmers are improving crop yields, using new technologies besides learning video-making skills — thanks to Digital Green which is catalysing a quiet revolution in the little hamlets of India. Delhi-based Digital Green focusses on educating farmers about farming techniques through locally produced videos in which local cultivators are featured. The project works in over 200 villages across Jharkhand, Orissa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh with seven NGOs, helping famers improve their...

A Vigyan Gram, or a science village, is to come up on the outskirts of Tripura's capital, complete with a museum, library, planetarium, botanical garden, bird sanctuary and other attractions to popularise science among the masses. The Vigyan Gram, to be modelled on the lines of science cities in various cities in India, would be set up at a cost of Rs.35 crore in western Tripura's Badharghat, a village on the...

The Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe described the press of his day in the following terms: ''You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.'' Things have only got worse in this matter in the eighty-odd years since these words were written, and they have probably got worse in many more places. And so the age-old dilemma between freedom of...