India and China Two largest populated countries of the world and next door neighbors; though greatly different in their cultures, lifestyles and most important pace of growth. Maintaining an edge over India in the manufacturing sector and urban infrastructure development, China is also not lagging behind in the rural development sector. China feeds 21% of the world population with only 9% of the world arable land. The 2nd largest populated country has to...

Is the government trying to push a new land Acquisition Bill without addressing the concerns of the deprived people who stand to lose their livelihoods? Peoples’ movements and social action groups have charged that the cash-based Haryana and Mayawati models of land acquisition are equally ‘dangerous’ for the landless and the deprived people who get uprooted without compensation or rehabilitation. People’s movements have been demanding that instead of bringing Land...

Among the various definitions of "noise" is this one: "Something that draws public notice". And "Making Noise" is precisely what groups all over India are doing, or planning to do, in the days ahead in order to wake up the government to its promises. In the year 2000, India was among the countries that had signed on to achieve, by 2015, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals...

India has long been simultaneously a country of enormous wealth and desperate poverty. In recent decades, the distance has only grown between those who enjoy living standards comparable to the finest in the world, and the millions left far behind. Even as Indians crowd the lists of the world’s richest dollar billionaires, an estimated 200 million people sleep hungry. Half our children are malnourished and nearly a fifth severely so....

Untouchability was not so much a sin as a calculated crime. But it is easier for everyone, even some victims, to treat it as a sin, for acceptance of moral culpability costs nothing. The recent walkabout (padayatre) of Basavananda Maadara Channaiah Swamiji, head of a Dalit matha (gurupeetha) in Chitradurga, in a predominantly Brahmin-inhabited agrahara in Mysore, and the cordial, indeed reverential, welcome he received highlight the changing formal perceptions about...