I want you to consider some well-known, oft-repeated facts: * About half of India’s children are malnourished, a record poorer than the world’s poorest area, sub-Saharan Africa. * India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry — about 230 million people — according to the World Food Programme. * India is the world’s second-largest grower of rice and wheat, and more than 50 million tonnes of foodgrains lie in...

The state must ensure that individual freedoms not only exist, but that everyone has the ability to experience them The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed...

Though Palakkad district in Kerala, where the Coca Cola plant is situated is considered as the ‘rice bowl of Kerala’, a part of the district falling in the rain shadow region of the Western Ghats is drought prone. Plachimada, where the Hindustan Coca Cola Beverages Private Limited (HCBPL) factory was set up had been classified ‘arable’. The villagers are predominantly landless agricultural labourers with almost 80 percent of the population...

A new drive has started to bring development to the remote north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. In a letter from the region, the BBC's former India correspondent Mark Tully says there are fears that it will undermine the traditional tribal culture of the area and alienate the population. Driving from the east of Arunachal Pradesh to its oldest town, Pasighat, I was made all too aware of the state's underdevelopment....

Kancha Ilaiah’s Post-Hindu India should be essential reading for all who get panicky about Mayawati’s brand of Dalit politics. Unlike the bsp supremo’s bid to empower marginalised groups through the levers of electoral democracy by wooing a wider ‘sarvajan samaj’, Ilaiah wants to launch an all-out civil war between Dalit Bahujans and Hindu society. This is an angry, provocative book written by a leading Dalit thinker, who is convinced that...