-The Hindu Manoharpur (Jharkhand): Deep inside the Saranda sal forest, Thalkobad lies at the core of what was a CPI (Maoist) "liberated zone" in Jharkhand's West Singhbhum district along the Odisha border. Thalkobad, along with 24 other villages, was reclaimed by the Indian state after a massive military operation - Operation Anaconda-I in August 2011 to destroy the CPI (Maoist) Eastern Regional Bureau and several training camps inside Saranda. The village...

-The Hindustan Times The audacious ambush and bloody massacre of more than two dozen political leaders and their security guards in Darbha valley of Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh, raises again profoundly important questions about the legitimacy of violence as an instrument to battle injustice and oppression. Resistance to injustice is widely endorsed as the highest human duty in most cultures, but the debate is about the legitimacy of deploying violence in...

-The Business Standard Not so efficiently or transparently but there is progress and hope, besides showcasing likely problems with the Centre's own law Mahasamund (Chhattisgarh): The UPA government at the Centre has been mulling hard on ways to enact its Food Security Bill, even as the Chhattisgarh government has completed six months of enacting a like law, one providing 35 kg of rice a month at Rs 2 a kg to all...

-IPS News ROME: The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades. After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a...

-The Hindu     In spite of the rosy picture painted by the World Bank, the prospect of eliminating extreme poverty remains distant In a protracted period of gloom and persistent recession with feeble signs of recovery in a large part of the developed world, the World Bank, Brookings Institution and others can be forgiven for their euphoria over the accomplishment of a key Millennium Development Goal (MDG) - of halving extreme poverty in...