-IPS News TIKAMGARH: Eighty-year-old Chenabai Kushwaha sits on a charpoy under a neem tree in the village of Chitawar, located in the Tikamgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, staring intently at a dictaphone. “Please sing a song for us,” urges the woman holding the voice recorder. Kushwaha obliges with a melancholy tune about an eight-year-old girl begging her father not to give her away in marriage. The melody melts...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

The fourteenth Public Accounts Committee (2014-15) report, submitted to the 16th Lok Sabha in April this year, has found that despite various interim orders issued by the Supreme Court from time to time (based on a writ petition that was filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties in April, 2001), the Government of India has failed to universalize the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. This means India has to...

-The Indian Express In Madhya Pradesh’s Hoshangabad district, reeling under malnourishment, govt shuts eggs out of anganwadis while locals see hope in poultry farming Maryarpura (Hoshangabad): Gagan Lachhu is so emaciated that he can hardly walk on his own. In a few months he will turn two but his weight is an alarming six kilograms. “Once, we nearly forced his mother to admit him at the Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre in Itarsi...

-The Hans India Warangal: Hunger and starvation coupled with denial of rights provide a fertile ground for the growth of Left Wing Extremism (LWE). The flustered forest-dwellers of the four districts – Adilabad, Karimnagar, Warangal and Khammam — who had been struggling against the might of the State, represented by a despotic forest department, appears to be losing their direction for the means of livelihood as the Forest Rights Act remained a ‘paper...