Dalit activist Meena Kandasamy: This is something that has to be changed Dalits make up more than 16% of India's population of one billion. Yet, despite years of campaigning and state intervention, many of them still face discrimination in society. Their hardship has been highlighted at an exhibition in London. A little girl leans against a stained turquoise concrete wall. You first notice her face, which appears deep in thought - then your...

INDIA has dropped two places to rank 67th amongst 84 developing nations in the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2010, with alarmingly high levels of hunger, undernourished and stunted children and poorly fed women. It is home to 42 per cent of the world’s underweight children under the age of five, based on data from 2003-2008 in the report released by the Food Policy Institute in Washington...

It is about capitalism and hierarchy The government has now reached a final conclusion on the raging controversy over the caste-based census in the country. In order to reconcile with the contending positions, the government has decided to conduct a separate stand-alone exercise of a parallel house-to-house enumeration of the caste affiliations of households. It is not yet clear as to whether the results and the data of the census proper...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...

Chezi K. Ganesan looks every inch the high-tech entrepreneur, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of denim shirt and khaki trousers, slick smartphone close at hand. He splits his time between San Jose and this booming coastal metropolis, running his $6 million a year computer chip-making company. His family has come a long way. His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste...