-The Hindu The chopping off of the palms of two migrant workers is a wake-up call The gruesome incident of the chopping off of the palms of two migrant labourers of Kalahandi district of western Odisha by the labour contractor mafia in December 2013 should serve as a wake-up call. The incident highlights the ruthless extent to which the mafia can go to meet its ends and brings home the fact that...

-Deccan Herald Between 2005 and 2010, 140 lakh people were displaced from agriculture and 57 lakh jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector. With a bountiful monsoon and a record foodgrain production, agriculture is going to be the saviour of the Indian economy in 2013-14. At a time when there is an all around doom and gloom -- industrial output failing to keep pace, manufacturing sector refusing to look up, joblessness growing,...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday shot off another letter to the Akhilesh Yadav government, accusing it of having failed to spend money given under the central schemes. This is Jairam's sixth dispatch to the SP government since it came to power in March, 2012. The letter to the chief minister focuses on the implementation of the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), a centrally-funded...

-Newclick.in Malnutrition is a big contributor to the low child sex ratio in Rewa district of Madhya Pradesh. The girls of the Kol tribe are suffering. The first white tiger, Mohan, ever found in natural history was in the jungles of Govindgarh in Rewa district in Madhya Pradesh in 1951. It was caught by the then king and imprisoned in his palace till its death. Located in the northeast part of the...

-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...