Extreme poverty and clamour for firewood have forced some people in Nayagram into extreme occupations. One such is gathering kolmipoka, an insect with medicinal value After walking almost 30km along rutted roads since the morning, middle-aged Bonchu Nayek returns to his humble home, a two-room hut, as darkness descends on Nayagram—one of West Bengal’s poorest villages—with his day’s earning of Rs10. Nayek, whose forefathers were hunters, belongs to the Lodha-Sabar tribe. With...

Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

Tribal dominated districts have turned the theory of bias for male offspring on its head, while literacy levels have registered a surprisingly high growth, perhaps signalling a marginal improvement in the overall social structure of a largely underdeveloped state held hostage to political instability and Left wing extremism. According to provisional data of Census 2011 for Jharkhand, released by director of census operations Sunil Kumar Burnwal today, tribal dominated districts like...

Andhra Pradesh will be the first state to use National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) funds to provide road connectivity and improve hygienic conditions in remote areas inhabited by Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe people. Rural connectivity has now been included in the permissible category of works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). Following this, the state government decided to spend Rs 1,000 crore from NREGS funds to...

The story of national shame continues for the second decade in a row for Haryana. Provisional census figures for 2011 show the districts of Jhajjar and Mahendergarh have the lowest child sex ratio in the country. There are 18.02 lakh boys under the age of 6 in Haryana; the number of girls in the same age group is 14.95 lakh. Though the overall child sex ratio has shown an improvement from...