Nagpur orange’s survival hinges precariously on its return to sustainable cultivation. Farmers have woken up to this, but will the government? A beaming Uday Wath hugs the trunk of his sturdy, disease-free Nagpur orange tree. All around him are trees drooping with the fruit, large and healthy. The tree trunks are singularly free of both telltale gummosis wounds and bluish white bordeaux paste, the chemical meant to prevent them. Not more than...

In the first of a series of reports on land rights, we look at the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where there have been violent clashes between local villagers and police in a dispute over land. It's a hot summer day and the air is thick with smoke from the diesel-powered trucks carrying bricks, cement and sand. There is a long line of vehicles along the road as the trucks jostle...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

DINDIGUL: For the first time, milch cows, calves and bulls at the ‘goshala' maintained by Dhandayuthapaniswamy Temple in Palani will facilitate the economic uplift of members of self-help groups (SHG) — mostly poor rural women — in Oddanchatram, Palani and Thoppampatti blocks in the district. The temple administration has started distributing these domestic animals to SHGs free of cost. The temple administration has laid only one condition: the recipient has to give...

A series of social audits in NREGS works in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district led to unearthing of humungous irregularities and filing of FIRs against several government and panchayat officials and release of delayed payments worth crores of rupees to the ordinary NREGS workers (See details/ links below). The irregularities included the use of sub-standard material, non-issuance of job cards or post office passbooks and fudging of account books. The audits were organized...