Who cares for a paltry Rs 100 per day clean pay from the government. If you are dealing in coal, a little more black in your pockets couldn't hurt. Job schemes under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Ramgarh district are floundering as labourers prefer to ferry coal for illegal traders, fetching them at least four times more wages. "I have no interest in job schemes initiated...

Eminent economists have shot off a letter to National Advisory Council (NAC) Chairman Sonia Gandhi to ensure that the proposed Food Security Bill is quite comprehensive and excludes only a few rich people. They also want Sonia to get the Bill legislated in such a way it is not based on the current public distribution system (PDS) for all times to come as direct subsidy transfer could also be an...

Is it the end of the road for the Lokpal panel? Talks between the government and social activists could be headed for a collapse after they disagreed on all key issues – Anna Hazare's team has threatened a walkout if the prime minister is exempted from the bills ambit. Fearing a repeat of the Anna movement, the government is trying to persuade Baba Ramdev to call off his hunger strike that...

The farmers' struggle against land acquisition only shows that from passive forms of protest they have turned to active forms of resistance. THE recent agitation by farmers in Uttar Pradesh against cropland acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is only the latest in a long series of protests by farmers and rural communities, which started a decade ago in different parts of the country and which gathered momentum over the past five...

Tribal people constitute close to 50 per cent of the population that has been displaced because of "developmental" activities. “IF you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country,” Jawaharlal Nehru has been quoted as telling the village residents to be displaced by the Hirakud dam in 1948. And so it has been for the past 64 years. People, mostly impoverished tribes, have been suffering because...