-Scroll.in The Paharia Adivasi community says they are cheated in their banking transactions and don't know what to do with the debit cards. Just days after the Central government’s demonetisation announcement on November 8 kicked off a major push for digital payments, Kusheshwar Paharia, a resident of Nathgoda village in Jharkhand’s Godda district, received a thick packet in the mail. It contained a letter from the State Bank of India, with which he...

-The Hindu On the tenth anniversary of the historic passage of the Forest Rights Act, tribal resistance to defend their rights is growing even as government after government tries to dilute its provisions On this day 10 years ago the historic Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act was passed in the Lok Sabha. Its conception and passage was the result of the decades of struggles and...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...

Two back-to-back reports that shed light on the status of MGNREGA implementation in the country, have been released recently from the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD). A review of MGNREGA implementation in 8 different states of India by a team of experts during the month of May this year reveals that in many of the drought affected districts, the Gram Panchayats have no work to offer under the programme. (Please click...

-IANS New Delhi: The government's "inability" to implement the Food Security Act among the 'Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups' in India has resulted in a drop in their population, National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) head Rameshwar Oraon has said. The former union minister of state for tribal affairs, who took over as chairperson of NCST in 2013, has also questioned the existence of many such PVGT communities if the government does not...