According to Transparency International, India ranks 87 in the 2010 corruption index in a list of 178 countries, ranked from very clean to highly corrupt. Ranked with India at 87 are Albania, Jamaica and Liberia. India slipped from 84 in 2009. In our country kickbacks, bribes, public swindles and land-grabbing is now virtually institutionalised. Clean politicians, bureaucrats and police officials are now seen as a rare, endangered species. And it’s...

Pachiammal's family has been fighting in court for what has been their land for two generations. They received the two-acre plot from the government, back in 1885, under the Panchami Scheme.   The scheme was brought in by the British during their rule over the Madras Presidency to empower Schedule Caste landless farmers.   Some years ago, it was forcibly taken over by a rich landlord who claims their dead parents owed him money. "We...

The family of murdered RTI activist Satish Shetty today alleged that the police did little to nab the “real culprits” during the months they investigated the murder. This “inaction”, younger brother Sandeep Shetty said, has emboldened land sharks, citing as a case in point Sunday's attack on an associate of Shetty in Talegaon, the very place where Shetty had been murdered on January 13 last year. The case has since been...

While China has made great economic and social progress in recent years, land degradation and the widening income gap between rural and urban are posing challenges to ensuring the right to food for its population, says an independent United Nations human rights expert. “Within a few decades, China has been able to feed itself and to feed one fifth of the entire world population. That is really impressive. Yet, considering a...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...