Nahrani, a 38-year-old in Lalitpur, a village 30km from Jhansi, has an all-too-familiar tale to tell: a recently deceased husband; the lack of a ration card which promises access to free or inexpensive food; and a village without water, power, schools or health centres. Not one child from the 50-odd families in this village goes to school. The menfolk are perennially drifting, looking for jobs. And no one has heard...

Armed Maoists and People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities leaders have warned nearly 200 villages in and around Lalgarh not to provide information to census officials. After collection of data for Census 2011 began in Bengal on April 1, Maoists, with guns slung across their shoulders, and People’s Committee leaders swooped on villages in Lalgarh, Salboni, Belpahari and Jhargram and asked people not to “co-operate” with the census teams. “We have asked...

Thirty-eight years after he set out on his mission to provide basic services and solutions to the problems of rural India, Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy from Rajasthan stands in the company of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar, noted economist Amartya Sen and author Chetan Bhagat as the Time magazine names him in the 2010 list of 100 people who most affect our world. It’s the work done by...

Nearly 65% of class V students in rural areas of Tamil Nadu can’t read even a class II textbook in their mother tongue, 45% don’t know subtraction and nearly 81% can’t read simple English sentences, the Annual Status of Education Report for 2009, compiled by Delhi-based NGO Pratham Foundation, has revealed. The findings of the survey, which had a sample size of 33,000 students in both private and government schools,...

Despite numerous special schemes and financial allocations, tribal communities in Hunsur taluk lead a life of poverty, marked by severe malnutrition. In Bettada haadi in the taluk, tribal residents grapple with appalling health conditions. Eight people in 28 families have tuberculosis, five have died in the past six years, and many others are malnourished and anaemic. They live in dilapidated houses that lack sanitation. Defunct borewells, broken pipes and non-functional streetlights...