-Hindustan Times Jaipur: Three-year-old Pawan of Dhaikheda village in Salumbder block of Udaipur district loves his new routine. He goes to a phulwari, a day-care centre, in Medifala under Bedawal gram panchayat every day at 9 am where he gets three meals, plays with toys as young tribal women from the area read out to him poems and stories. His two sisters had died of malnutrition. Pawan too was diagnosed with acute...

-The Indian Express The labour contractor demanded Rs 1.4 lakh for the 10 people who were paid in advance but slipped away. Bhubaneswar: Nilambar Dhangdamajhi, a 22-year-old tribal farmer from Kalahandi district, whose right palm was chopped off by a labour contractor in December 2013, died last evening. Dhangdamajhi, suffering from an unknown fever for last few days, passed away at his home in Nuaguda village of Kalahandi’s Jaipatna block. His wife...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: "Farmers need to increase their land holdings to at least 10-12 acres in order to earn a decent income from agriculture. Unfortunately, not many farmers in the state own land up to this level," said Sukhdeo Thorat, the chairman of Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Thorat, who was speaking at a seminar on farm crisis organized by Dr Ambedkar Agricos Association of India, said the...

Access to land and its resources is important since it determines the extent of poverty and deprivation one faces. Historically tribal populations and other traditional forest dwellers did not enjoy any legal entitlement such as ownership rights or user rights of the forest lands where they had been living since ages, both communally and individually. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is, thus, seen as a progressive legislation that attempted to...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...