-Women's Feature Service   For tribal communities, the forest has traditionally been their habitat, their source of income and their nutritional lifeline. So protection of the green cover and ready access to forest produce are issues that are connected with their survival. In India, while The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, recognises the rights of forest-dwellers over land and other resources, in reality there...

-The New Indian Express     Bangalore: As the battle for the Lok Sabha elections intensifies, the fight against the UPA government's pet Aadhaar project found support on Sunday as a group of academicians and technocrats spoke against the unique identification project in the city. The head of the project - Nandan Nilekani - is a technocrat himself and also the Congress candidate from Bangalore South constituency. In a discussion on the project, organised...

It seems that a long-drawn-out battle among economists about economic growth trickling down into development has found some solid answer. A recent paper published in the Lancet Global Health journal (April, 2014), which has been jointly written by a team of experts based on evidence from 121 Demographic and Health Surveys from 36 low-income and middle-income countries shows that there exists little or no association between increases in per capita...

-The Business Standard   No state has met the basic RTE norms of trained teachers, infrastructure needs or pupil-teacher ratio On April 1, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education of Children (RTE) will turn four. The landmark law enacted by the United Progressive Alliance in 2009 was yet another entitlement to deliver free compulsory education to all children between the ages of 6 and 14. Till date, no state has met the...

-The Hindu   The impressive gain by rural households in spite of the favouritism towards non-primary activities appears real The Indian economy has moved on a high growth path since the mid-1980s. After a blip in growth between 1990-92, liberalisation, initiated for aligning the Indian economy with the world in 1991, not only put the economy back on a higher growth path but also sustained this growth till the 2000s. During the last...