-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Landlessness and dependence on manual casual labour for a livelihood are key deprivations facing rural families, socio-economic census figures suggest. This, experts say, means they are far more vulnerable to impoverishment than indicated by a plain reading of the census data. While 48.5 per cent of all rural households are saddled with at least one deprivation indicator, the eye-opener is how much the other factors overlap with...

-The Hindu   Far from being ‘useless’, the MNREGA helps the impoverished and resilient poor earn a decent living. Famously on the floor of Parliament, Prime Minister Modi dismissed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) as a ‘living monument’ of the previous governments’ failures, condemning millions of impoverished people to survive by ‘digging ditches’. This spring near Bhim in Rajasthan, I had the rare experience of labouring on an MGNREGA site....

  If environmental degradation disturbs you and you are averse to reading technical manuals and copious volumes on the subject, there is some good news for you.    A recently published book from Gene Campaign entitled Coping with Climate Change is doing the rounds among environmentalists, civil society activists, public servants and researchers. Edited by Dr. Suman Sahai, the book has been written in a coffee book style to make easy serious...

-IANS Washington: Groundwater is disappearing fast from the world and India is among the worst hit, shows data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. Among the world's largest groundwater basins, the Indus Basin aquifer of India and Pakistan, which is a source of fresh water for millions of people, is the second-most overstressed with no natural replenishment to offset usage, said two new studies led by the University of...

-The Hindu Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey speak about the MKSS experience and their campaign for citizen-centric accountability. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan was founded in Bhim on May 1, 1990 with the aim of organising people at the grassroots. By addressing issues of minimum wage and land and reading out official records, thereby exposing the enormous corruption in the system, it mobilised peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. A dharna held...