-The World Bank blog "Five years ago, I was no one," said Kunti Devi to me, sitting up straight against the wall of her one-room mud hut in Bara, a small village in India's eastern state of Bihar. "Now, people know me by my own name, not just by the name of my children." I was sitting on the floor, across from Devi, a mother of eight, who belonged to one of...
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Scene At Land’s End -Prasenjit Bose
-Outlook The LARR bill must plug gaps that allow ingress of misery for the affected The UPA's proposed land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement (LARR) bill contains several provisions which seek to improve upon the existing land acquisition law. Anyway, the present law has clearly run its course, with people no longer willing to submit to coercion by the state. The enactment of a new land acquisition law, in order to make...
More »Dealing With The Maoists -Chitrangada Choudhury and Ajay Dandekar
-Outlook The Maoists want a military conflict as it brings more adivasis into their fold. The Indian state's best bet is in ensuring that it wins over the aam adivasis to its side. May 25th's condemnable attack by the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army, which ended up killing and injuring over 50 people from Congress politicians to migrant adivasi labourers, cannot be understood without recognising the Maoist party's explicit political aims. These...
More »Aruna Roy, social activist and NCPRI member interviewed by Pallavi Polanki
-Firstpost.com After the UPA-II released its self-congratulatory 79-page ‘Report card to the People', National Advisory Council (NAC) member and leading social activist Aruna Roy has come down heavily on the government for its poor performance in the social sector. Roy, an instrumental force behind the Right to Information Act, criticised the government for stalling on essential legislations such as the Food Security Bill, the Land Acquisition Bill and the Lokpal Bill. Roy spoke...
More »From Bofors to 2G, the same fate-Arun Kumar
-The Hindu The parliamentary committees on the howitzer scam and the stock market scandal protected the powerful and failed to fix accountability. The same is true in the spectrum case The current political situation brings back memories of 1989. The Prime Minister then was under a cloud in the Bofors scam. Many of his close associates like Lalit Suri and Ajitabh Bachchan were accused of wrong-doing. Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and...
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