Nearly a year after Tadmetla in Dantewada hit national headlines with the massacre of 76 CRPF jawans, grief-stricken villagers in Dantewada alleged that security forces burnt down more than two hundred homes, sexually assaulted a woman and took away two men on March 16. Tadmetla has been scorched and reduced to rubble by the police, they said. In detailed and gruesome accounts given to journalists, the tribals alleged that five days...

As the demand for a ban on Endosulfan in India is gaining pitch and Karnataka being the latest state to ban the pesticide, the Pesticide Manufacturers and Formulators Association of India (PMFAI) is going around crying foul. They are leaving no stone unturned to save endosulfan. Press meets across the country and plugged newspaper reports maligning studies that have indicted endosulfan in the past is a desperate attempt to save...

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday complained to the Centre about a BT-maize trial by a multinational company at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI) campus in Samastipur district without obtaining permission of the state government. In a letter to Union environment and forests minister Jairam Ramesh, Kumar said Monsanto India Ltd laid trial of BT-maize at IARI campus in Pusa on February 21 before receiving a go ahead letter...

Niyamat was brave. But Bhukhan wants to live. The brutal killing of MGNREGS crusader and Jean Drèze aide Niyamat Ansari has triggered an exodus from his native village of Jerua in Latehar’s Manika block. And alarmed co-worker Bhukhan Singh, whose house was also targeted on that fateful March 2 night, is leading this unnerved group. In fact, the horror isn’t just limited to Jerua, rural job scheme activists in several neighbouring villages...

Let Aruna die? No, with her alive, there’s more power, media attention. Hence, the politics of mercy in medicine. Lucknow airport. Late ’90s. Khushwant Singh and I are waiting for our flights, we talk about Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee mentioning my book Once Was Bombay in a speech on collapsing cities. He suddenly asks, “You wrote that book on the woman who neither lives nor dies, you still see her?” I...