-World Resources Institute India struggles with water scarcity, a problem that poses especially huge implications for the country's food security and rural livelihoods. The country has long-battled its scarcity issues through Watershed Development, a participatory approach to improve water management through afforestation and reforestation, sustainable land management, soil and water conservation, water-harvesting infrastructure, and social interventions. But while watershed development has been employed in communities throughout India, its potential long-term costs...

-Survival International Anthropologist Dr. Felix Padel works with the tribes of Odisha in eastern India, including the Dongria Kondh, for whom Survival International has campaigned for 10 years. Felix is the great great grandson of Charles Darwin and lives in a remote village in Odisha. In this interview, he talks to Survival about the Dongria Kondh's relationship to their mountains, their heroic struggle against Vedanta, Darwin's evolution theory and the experience...

-Outlook Bhubaneswar (Odisha): The Centre will work jointly with Odisha government to end the practice of bonded labour, Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh said. "I look forward to working with the state government to put an end to this horrendous social evil," he said in a letter to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. Centre would implement a special livelihood project started under National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) to mitigate the plight of...

-The Hindustan Times Mahatma Gandhi urged us, in our moments of doubt, to recall the face of the poorest person we may have seen and ask ourselves whether the step we are contemplating is likely be of any use to him or her. It is in this spirit that Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was launched. It is perhaps the most ambitious social security and public works programme...

-PTI The maternal mortality rate in West Bengal has dropped sharply by 20% due to health reforms in the state, latest statistics say. Quoting a latest survey report prepared by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who also holds the health portfolio, told PTI that the maternal mortality rate (MMR) rate has fallen to 117 per 1 lakh childbirths during 2010-12. The figure during the...