With decline in insurgency, infrastructural development is taking place once again in Nagaland, especially in its rural areas. The change can be witnessed, particularly in villages where government-sponsored schemes are being implemented. Nagaland's Seithekema village is one such example. Located 20 kilometres from Dimapur on the National Highway-39, it exists as a hamlet. Established in 1979, it is located along the Valley of Parkai Mountain Range and inhabited by Angami tribals. The people here...

The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008. Last week's long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence. As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China,...

Jagdishji Vaghela is one of hundreds of thousands of farmers standing in the way of India's breakneck economic expansion. Determined not to give up his land for an industrial park in the western state of Gujarat, the 55-year-old farmer scorns at talk of how the benefits of industrialization in Asia's third-largest economy will trickle down to people like him. Despite a nearby plant producing what is touted as the world's cheapest car,...

Dams may have been the temples of modern India to Jawaharlal Nehru, but Uttarakhand’s BJP government has stopped work on a hydel project because priests and devotees fear it might submerge a Kali temple. The government’s surprise move on Thursday on the 400MW Alakananda project is steeped in local politics and coincides with a countrywide debate on development-versus-environment. But it also highlights how easy it has become to block power projects in...

The poor in India's cities are in many ways worse off than those in rural areas, says Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Minister Kumari Selja, pointing out that the urban population is set to double in the next 25 years to over 600 million. 'About 300 million people live in towns and cities underserved by utilities, with inadequate housing and increasingly choking traffic. The condition of the urban poor is by...