Trade unions and labour rights activists blame the high suicide rate in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, on the practices of the garment industry. TIRUPUR has carved out a niche for itself in the world of garments. Its phenomenal growth in the highly competitive global scenario, particularly in the past two decades, has been made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of its manufacturers and exporters and the sweat and labour of thousands of...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MG-NREGA) has been in news mainly due to corruption or inefficiency. The country has spent close to Rs 40,000 crore this fiscal but a large number of urban middle class people and opinion leaders don’t know what to make of it. Cynicism apart, the rights-based scheme has proved to be a game-changer in rural India despite mixed success. The scheme has been relatively...

In three districts of Haryana, they have been agitating against the land acquisition policy of the State government. WHEN farmers of western Uttar Pradesh took to the streets protesting against the acquisition of their lands and demanding a just compensation package from the State government, the central leadership of the Congress was quick to cite the example of Haryana, where, according to United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the best policies...

Apni kheti, apna khaad / Apna beej, apna swaad (Our own farm, our own fertiliser / Our own seeds, our own taste) -- Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi. A farmer from Tandia village in Varanasi has a solution to India's burgeoning food crisis. In a land where poverty, hunger, malnutrition and farmer suicides are rampant, Prakash Singh Raghuvanshi's innovation could work wonders. He has single-handedly developed a number of high yielding, nutritious...