A United Nations report titled The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples says the indigenous people and tribes worldwide are facing extinction and exploitation due to threats of displacement and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources. It takes note of the displacement of thousands of families of the Santhal Adivasis in the Indian State of Jharkhand as a result of Extraction of minerals, without proper compensation or economic security. The...

Farmers in Maharashtra revive 120 varieties of local crops   Dark brown seeds pointed at both ends resemble the kind of wild seeds growing just anywhere that children would collect to play with. Only, this seed is one of the rare and nutritious foods losing out to the rush for market food. To the Mahadeo Koli and Thakar tribals in the rain-shadow areas of Sahyadri hills, this millet is known as batu...

The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

Reader responses to last week’s column on media-related malpractices during elections throw further light on this serious issue, which is now before the Press Council of India. Some of them contend that the alleged malpractices were neither new nor confined to Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. No less shocking than the “coverage package” of Maharashtra or the “cash transfer scheme” of Andhra Pradesh is the “power of Extraction” that allegedly played...

If there is one sector that is visibly the intersection of backroom politics, crony capitalism and serious threats to India’s internal security, it is mining. The business of resource Extraction has always had its own peculiar economic logic: modern, yet dependent on the land; high-tech, yet somehow, indefinably, with feudal overtones. These anomalies have traditionally been recognised by economists, who categorise mining as the only “industrial” component of the primary,...