-The Telegraph Jamshedpur: As water scarcity forces many urban residents to rely on tanker dole, a village around 35km southeast of Jamshedpur enjoys piped drinking water 24/7 thanks mainly to self-help. All 1,617 residents of over 300 households of Durku village in Kuldiha panchayat, Potka block, get safe tap water to drink. The reason behind it is surprising. Swajaldhara, a UPA-I drinking water scheme based on self-financing, which largely failed in the country...

-Hindustan Times We live in a social regime where women are seen as an embodiment of men’s izzat (honour). Attacking ‘their women’ then becomes the undoing of the whole community. Bilkis Bano. The name and the face have been haunting me since the judgment was announced on her case by the Bombay High Court on May 4. In March 2002, our group of six women arrived in Ahmedabad to document what had...

-Scroll.in Instead of wages for a short period of time, the family running the project in Lanka village will create an asset for life. Mahavir Parhaiya’s household in the remote village of Lanka in Latehar district of Jharkhand is bustling with activity. They are busy working on setting up a mango plantation on what was once a barren plot near their house, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Determined to fix accountability for lakhs of NGOs that received government grants of more than Rs 6,600 crore between 2002 and 2009, the Supreme Court asked the Centre on Wednesday to explore the desirability of a new law to regulate fund utilisation by the bodies. "Whatever be the method, we are clear that NGOs and voluntary organisations must give audited accounts of utilisation of funds received...