They plan to raise bank loans to build their own homes and take up agriculture Landless Dalit families in a Kancheepuram village have used the Right to Information (RTI) Act to prompt the district administration to hand over land that was originally allotted to them several years ago, thanks to the initiative of a grassroots NGO. A total of 106 Dalit families in Alisoor village were allotted 100 sq m...

C.K.Ramachandran Consultant - governance, institutional reform and rural livelihoods   N.Narayanasamy SAGE New Delhi, India 2009 Pages - 363 Price Rs. 550   This is an exhaustive treatise on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) which evolved during the 80s and 90s as a reaction to the top-down approach to development. The book traces the evolution of PRA in considerable detail and attempts to distinguish it from several other related streams of participatory approaches some of which have vanished without...

A UNESCO dossier examines the problems faced by the original tribal inhabitants of the Andaman islands. SINCE the 1780s, a variety of players have vied for space in the Andaman archipelago. Today, apart from the three wings of the country's armed forces, others including rice farmers, timber merchants and academics are trying to push out its original inhabitants from their traditional habitats. For the first time in the past 150 years,...

With global efforts to end child labour showing mixed results, United Nations agencies are urging greater action to achieve the goal of eliminating the scourge by 2016. The latest report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) says that if current trends continue, the 2016 target will not be reached and a renewed push to end child labour is urgently needed. As millions of people around the world focus their attention...

The international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, opened a photo exhibition titled Starved for Attention earlier this month at The Times Center in New York City. The exhibition is part of a multimedia campaign on the crisis of childhood malnutrition that MSF is spearheading in conjunction with VII Photo, an agency created in 2001 by seven leading photojournalists from across the world. The campaign was conceived...