-Livemint.com Despite facing discrimination at every step, Kaushal Panwar managed to achieve her dreams. But she says her identity, for people around her, is still that of a Dalit. It’s like hitting a brick wall with bare fists. You could just give up, thinking you’ll make no more than a scratch. Or you could smash through one day, with the help of a chalk and a slate. When the little Dalit girl first...

-Scroll.in Gadchiroli has recognised community forest rights in 66% of eligible land, compared to the state’s figure of 15%. Ten years after the Centre passed a law granting Adivasis and other forest dwellers rights to manage resources in forest lands, Maharashtra has emerged as the front-runner among states in implementing the provisions of this legislation, followed closely by Kerala. A new report by Community Forest Rights Learning and Advocacy – a collective...

-The Hindu Our education system has failed to integrate the rural into the larger political community, the nation Rural Mandsaur, where five persons were killed during a demonstration recently, is a prosperous region of western Madhya Pradesh. More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity of spending two days with the children of a private residential school in Mandsaur. At that time, it was the only English-medium residential school. Its vast and...

-TheWire.in The government knows what it wants to achieve where the environment is concerned, even if it is at the cost of the protection of ecosystems, and people’s livelihood and well being. The last three years under the Modi government have seen the transformation of the environment from being a field of relative stability and inactivity, to functioning as an active instrument of capital accumulation. The sharp polarisation between extremely positive initiatives...

-The Financial Express A half-dozen years ago, I participated in a conference on water resource challenges in India. I remember Upmanu Lall, professor at Columbia University, graphically and bluntly making the point that Punjab’s water table was not far from collapse. This has been known for years, and there have been feeble efforts to deal with the problem, but they have been far short of what is needed. My own understanding...