Are millions of Indians being forced to leave their villages for cities and towns because there aren't enough jobs at home and farm incomes are drying up? Is this "distress migration" unprecedented in India's history? Award-winning journalist P Sainath thinks so. Examining the latest census data, he finds that India's urban population has risen more (91 million more than in the 2001 census) than the rural population (90.6 million more than...

The state's rice bowl is left empty An unviable minimum support price (MSP) for rice has forced farmers in Andhra Pradesh to leave their lands fallow. The movement is spreading to other states. “Farming never pays” is a familiar slogan among agriculturists across the world, and especially so in India. Nevertheless, many continue to cultivate their fields year after year, barely eking out an existence, toiling in the hope that the tide...

The multinational refuses to be sensitive to the grievances of its Indian workforce, which generates the greater proportion of the company's profits. The workers of the Maruti Suzuki India Limited's (MSIL) plant in Haryana's Manesar have been agitating since August-end against the dismissal and suspension of more than 60 of their colleagues and the management's insistence on their signing a ‘good conduct bond' before they are allowed to enter the plant....

The re-classification of villages and towns, and the changes this brings to the nation's rural-urban profile, happens every decade. Yet only Census 2011 shows us a huge turnaround, with urban India adding more people (91 million) than rural India (90.6 million) for the first time in 90 years. Clearly, something huge has happened in the last 10 years that drives those numbers. And that is: huge, uncharted migrations of people...

-The Telegraph   The outbreak of Japanese encephalitis in and around Ranchi has assumed pandemic proportions, with authorities at Ranchi Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) reporting 12 child deaths since August 16 till date. Moreover, 36 among the 81 children admitted to the state-run hospital have been confirmed to be suffering from the mosquito-borne viral disease. All 36 are children, between the age group of five and 11 years. Japanese encephalitis, marked by high...