-Down to Earth   Tribal voters refused to allow polling officers to put ink mark on their finger nail, fearing reprisal by Maoists In the dense forests of Saranda in Jharkhand, residents say two things rarely touch the ground-one, sunlight and, two, government development schemes. The forest had been a hotbed of Maoist activities and a large number of panchayats in Manoharpur block around the dense forest never voted in the past...

-The Hindu   ‘An offshoot of trickle-down urbanisation, census towns like Hatia and Hinjewadi can be engines of change for rural areas' Hatia, Ranchi: At the southern edge of Ranchi city lies Hatia, and not all of its residents are sure if theirs is a village or part of Ranchi city's sprawl into its surrounding rural areas. "It's still a village. The panchayat has the land records," says Santosh Majhi, standing by the side...

-The Hindustan Times Maharashtra: Vidarbha is an unforgiving place, parched, dry and restive. It is a place of waiting - for the rains, for dams, for a harvest that may never come. Lately, there's been a storm brewing in these 11 arid districts "All of Maharashtra is getting richer, but here in Vidarbha, everything is standing still," says Sachin Gawande, 30, a graduate and farmer from Risod town in Akola. "Ours remains...

-The Hindustan Times   Sakhri Nate: In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the 5,000-odd voters of Sakhri Nate, a Muslim village, took their day off from fishing activities, sacrificing a day's earning, to vote for Congress candidate Nilesh Rane. Five years later, the story is different. They have dared Congress leader Narayan Rane and his son Nilesh to enter their village. On Thursday, the Ranes cancelled their scheduled meeting here when they learnt that...

-The Hindu Chennai (Tamil Nadu): Many still believe that the UPA regime's flagship rural job scheme, the ‘Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)', silently did wonders for the Congress in 2009 Lok Sabha polls. Will it be a game-changer in the 2014 polls also? There is no straight ‘Yes' or a ‘No' for an answer, as this correspondent discovered during a tour of some of the districts in Tamil...