Sivadasan's five-acre farm used to be a solitary patch in Kerala's Palakkad district, with bitter gourd, cucumber, cow peas and lady's finger growing amid a landscape dotted with paddy fields and plantations of rubber and spices.  Just five years later, more than 1.45 lakh farmers in the southern state have joined Sivadasan and started growing vegetables, reflecting a palpable shift sweeping across the Indian countryside.  "Vegetables are always more profitable than paddy,"...

-PTI   Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh today said that had the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act been implemented properly, the naxal menace would not have become so big in Chhattisgarh and other places. Talking to reporters after his tour of the naxal-affected areas of the state, Ramesh said that PESA was brought in in 1996 to strengthen panchayats of scheduled areas, but it was not enforced in the right...

-The Times of India   More than 8,000 tribals, armed with traditional weapons, participated in a demonstration organized in front of the office of the Balangir collector on Friday. They criticized the government for taking no action against fake tribal certificate holders. They went round the Balangir town in a rally before coming to the collector office. Security was beefed up in the town in view of the agitation. The agitators submitted a...

A river of bows and arrows slid through the urbane lanes of Raipur civil lines, coming to a startling stop outside the chief minister's gated and guarded residence in the autumn air of November 1st, the founding day of Chhattisgarh. As the police whisked them away, the tribal protestors told journalists they were asking for the most basic constitutional right: proportional reservation in government jobs. Eleven years ago, the sprawling state...

Failure of crops due to continuing dry season spells doom in agency The damning trend of farmer suicides seems to have arrived even in the agency areas of Adilabad district following the failure of cotton crop this season. As many as six of the 13 cotton farmers to have committed suicide since August 29 belong to the Banjara and Gond tribes. This is the first time when so many suicides among tribal...